Your calculation for QALYs added for each kidney donation is different from the 2014 Tom Ash estimation. How did you calculate it? The USRDS annual report doesn’t provide an average change in life expectancy between dialysis patients and live transplant patients.
I’m happy to provide the code—I took a weighted average of the difference in life expectancy between dialysis and transplant by sex and age (all the data was downloadable from the USRDS 2022 Annual Report) to get the overall estimate in added life expectancy from transplant. I then adjusted based on the expected difference in life expectancy given living donation vs. deceased (the ratio according to several sources including NKR is approximately 2x life years added).
I then adjusted these estimates by the Matas paper on discounted years to translate life expectancy into QALYs. They discount one year on dialysis to .68 QALYs and one year with a transplant to .84 QALYs.
Your calculation for QALYs added for each kidney donation is different from the 2014 Tom Ash estimation. How did you calculate it? The USRDS annual report doesn’t provide an average change in life expectancy between dialysis patients and live transplant patients.
I’m happy to provide the code—I took a weighted average of the difference in life expectancy between dialysis and transplant by sex and age (all the data was downloadable from the USRDS 2022 Annual Report) to get the overall estimate in added life expectancy from transplant. I then adjusted based on the expected difference in life expectancy given living donation vs. deceased (the ratio according to several sources including NKR is approximately 2x life years added).
I then adjusted these estimates by the Matas paper on discounted years to translate life expectancy into QALYs. They discount one year on dialysis to .68 QALYs and one year with a transplant to .84 QALYs.
You can read about the methodology here.