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Figure 3 Cumulative discounted costs, actual and projected. Actual cumulative discounted costs are plotted for the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) and conventional-therapy (CONV) arms up to 3.5 years. Projected costs are based on a regression model and plotted over the range from 0 to 12 years; up to 3.5 years, they use the regression model for costs together with Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival, whereas after 3.5 years, there are three variations for the ICD arm projections, corresponding to three assumptions about projected survival, and one CONV arm projection (Fig. 1 legend). The actual ICD arm costs are slightly higher than the projected values because, in projections, the costs of 32 replacement ICDs that occurred in the observation period were removed (to fit a regression model), and all replacement costs were assumed to occur at exactly 5 and 10 years, resulting in jumps in the ICD arm curves at those times. The jump near the origin is caused by the initial ICD implantation.
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