Standardization and Regulatory Guidelines May Inhibit Science and Reduce the Usefulness of Analyses Based on the Application of Preference-Based Measures for Policy Decisions
As Mavranezouli and colleagues 1 note, the use of a 10-y time horizon for health states for their time tradeoff (TTO) preference elicitation may have affected their results. So why did these authors choose a 10-y time horizon? Proximally, they probably chose this time horizon because one of the important objectives of the study on which the article is based was to generate evidence for a submission to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales. NICE recommends the TTO and a 10-y time horizon—the time horizon that was used in the Measurement and Valuation of Health (MVH) study on which the UK scoring function for EQ-5D is based. Distally, the authors probably chose the 10-y time horizon to enhance the comparability between their results and results from other studies. Indeed, the 10-y time horizon has been very frequently used.