Eliciting patient preferences: the benefits and risks of MS treatments
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Eliciting patient preferences on the benefits and risks of treatments for relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis
IRAS ID
144663
Contact name
Kimberley Hockley
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Imperial College London
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 4 months, 30 days
Research summary
Decisions about the benefit-risk balance of a treatment rely on clinical data and individual preferences. The final decision is strongly affected by how a decision-maker values the benefits of a treatment against its risks. It is possible that these values may vary from one stakeholder to another, for example, although the balance might seem positive to one person and the treatment should be made available to patients, it might be negative to another. This means that it is important for the patient and public perspective to be represented in benefit-risk assessment.
Although there is a strong interest about how Patient and Public Involvement principles can be applied to benefit-risk assessment, we found that there was a lack of guidelines. As a result, our research study focuses on a key area of involving patients and the public: to see how feasible formal methods are to value the benefits and risks of relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis medicines with patients. The methods are: Discrete Choice Experiments (DCE), Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis swing-weighing (MCDA), Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Measuring Attractiveness by a Category-Based Evaluation Technique (MACBETH). Each method asks patients to consider different treatment outcomes and compare them against one another using different questioning methods.
We will recruit relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis patients visiting Charing Cross and St. Mary’s Hospital, London, England for their treatment. Firstly, patients will be asked if they are interested in completing a questionnaire (lasting 45 minutes) which contains either the AHP or DCE method. Then they will be invited to participate in a focus group (lasting six hours) which uses the swing-weighting or MACBETH method.
This study is being run by Pharmacoepidemiological Research on Outcomes of Therapeutics by a European Consortium (PROTECT). We are a collaborative European project comprising of a consortium of academics, regulators, patient organisations and industry.
REC name
South Central - Oxford B Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/SC/1442
Date of REC Opinion
9 Jan 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion