Journal of clinical epidemiology
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To determine which literature-based definitions of low back pain (LBP) could be combined to produce sufficiently similar sets for use in a meta-analysis. ⋯ In a research area that currently lacks uniformly accepted definitions of outcomes, we successfully used a Delphi consensus process to reach substantial agreement on combinable LBP outcomes that would be combinable for a meta-analysis.
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There is evidence that utility elicitation methods used in the calculation of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) yield different results. It is not clear how these differences impact economic evaluations. ⋯ Depending on the method for determining utility values used in the calculation of QALYs, very different incremental cost-utility ratios are generated.