Nutrition economics: an innovative approach to informed public health management

The role of nutrition to optimize the use of scarce resources through its linkage with health and welfare should be considered of interest by healthcare decision makers. A favorable impact of food on non-communicable disorders and general health status will improve healthcare expenditure and quality of life.In health economics, an analysis of the costs and effects of a healthcare technology by means of a cost-effectiveness analysis has become an established tool. Projections about the effectiveness and expected costs of an intervention can be modeled using realistic and explicit assumptions based on outcomes from randomized clinical studies. However, the use of health economic techniques to assess costs and effects is not solely restricted to classic healthcare products such as medicines. To illustrate this we used two published cost-effectiveness studies, which consider respectively a preventive treatment against severe respiratory syncytial virus infection in children at high risk of hospitalization and the use of prebiotics for the primary prevention of atopic dermatitis.These examples illustrate that there is a parallel between the methodologies for extrapolation of intermediate outcomes to long-term outcomes between a cost-effectiveness analysis for pharmaceutical or nutrition, as long as the clinical evidence for nutrition fulfils the requirements for pharmaceuticals. Another requirement is that there is clinical widely accepted evidence that matches a comparable level of epidemiological observations about the link between short-term and long-term outcomes.Better understanding of how nutritional status and behavior may interplay with the socioeconomic environment will ultimately contribute to preserving the sustainability of healthcare provisions.