Cost-effectiveness of decellularised bone allograft compared with fresh-frozen bone allograft for acetabular impaction bone grafting during a revision hip arthroplasty in the UK

Objectives: Fresh-frozen allograft is the gold-standard bone graft material used during revision hip arthroplasty. However, new technology has been developed to manufacture decellularised bone with potentially better graft incorporation. As these grafts cost more to manufacture, the aim of this cost-effectiveness study was to estimate whether the potential health benefit of decellularised bone allograft outweighs their increased cost.

Study design: A Markov model was constructed to estimate the costs and the quality-adjusted life years of impaction bone grafting during a revision hip arthroplasty.

Setting: This study took the perspective of the National Health Service in the UK.

Participants: The Markov model includes patients undergoing a revision hip arthroplasty in the UK.

Intervention: Impaction bone grafting during a revision hip arthroplasty using either decellularised bone allograft or fresh-frozen allograft.

Measures: Outcome measures included: total costs and quality-adjusted life years of both interventions over the lifetime of the model; and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios for both graft types, using base case parameters, univariate sensitivity analysis and probabilistic analysis.

Results: The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio for the base case model was found to be £270 059 per quality-adjusted life year. Univariate sensitivity analysis found that changing the discount rate, the decellularised bone graft cost, age of the patient cohort and the revision rate all had a significant effect on the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio.

Conclusions: As there are no clinical studies of impaction bone grafting using a decellularised bone allograft, there is a high level of uncertainty around the costs of producing a decellularised bone allograft and the potential health benefits. However, if a decellularised bone graft was manufactured for £2887 and lowered the re-revision rate to less than 64 cases per year per 10 000 revision patients, then it would most likely be cost-effective compared with fresh-frozen allograft.