A Method for Comparing Health Inequality Impact Magnitudes, with an Illustration for Hypothetical Treatments of 1336 Diseases.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

We aimed to facilitate the comparison and communication of magnitudes of health inequality impact across interventions for different diseases, and to indicate the potential range of such impacts.

Methods

We propose rescaling the slope index of inequality to measure the health inequality impact as the change in the gap in total predicted quality-adjusted life-years between the least and most socially disadvantaged groups, with linear regression predictions used to account for effects on intermediate groups. We suggest reporting the inequality impact relative to the total health opportunity cost to facilitate comparison across interventions varying in scale and unit costs. We illustrated the approach with aggregate distributional cost-effectiveness analyses of hypoth

SUBMITTER: Cookson R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12917025 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature