[Value of utility measures: recurrent respiratory infections]

Medical decisions have to integrate not only the clinical dimension of a disorder, but also all the repercussions of the therapeutic strategy on the patient's life. Various techniques may be used to identify the preferences of a subject, by estimating the relative utility associated with different states of health. One of these techniques, the "standard gamble", enabled us to determine the utility that patients with recurrent respiratory infections associate with the results of various therapies. The findings show that this utility is not a linear function of therapeutic results. They also show that when the number of years of lost life is calculated, the loss due to alteration of the quality of life linked to the frequency of acute episodes is not obstructive pulmonary disease.