[Neuropharmacoeconomics]

Pharmacoeconomics is concerned with how to allocate drug resources among alternative uses efficiently and effectively. Economic evaluation is a set of formal quantitative methods to capture the outcomes and costs of alternate intervention strategies. There are four basic types of economic evaluations used to assess interventions, are classified on the basis of the outcomes employed: 1. Cost minimization (CMA) is the comparison of costs of alternative interventions when the outcomes are assumed to be equal or similar, and the control intervention has been established. 2. Cost-effectiveness (CEA) is appropriate when the health outcomes are measured in common physical units, such as death or disability, or years gained or increased function, or points on cognitive scales. 3. Cost utility (CUA) is an extension of cost-effectiveness, where different types of health outcomes are weighted according to assigned values of 'quality of life' to produce a composite of both the physical measurement and the value assigned to it, e.g. quality-adjusted life years (QALY) or disability-adjusted life years (DALY). A common denominator measure of effectiveness is thus the life years of expected survival, or the QALY. The global burden disease (GBD) researchers adopted an internationally standardized form of the QALY, which they called the DALY. A quality of life measure can be translated into a scale that ranges from a low of 0.0 (the worst possible health state, usually taken as death) to 1.0 (perfect health). The purpose is to make explicit the measurement of costs and value assigned to benefits. 4. Cost-benefit (CBA) analysis value health outcomes in monetary terms, often based on the concept of 'willingness to pay'. The common drugs used by the neurologists had been discussed in this article based on the point view of pharmacoeconomics.