Figure 1:

Costs and quality-adjusted life years (discounted at 5%) per 1,000 40-year-olds for all uniform and personalised colorectal cancer screening scenarios and a scenario without screening, with the efficient frontier connecting the economically efficient strategies^a assuming: a) perfect adherence; b) realistic adherence and c) perfect adherence and no costs associated with determining risk.

Abbreviations: QALYs = quality-adjusted life years

Note: A description of the personalised screening scenarios can be found in Table 4.

a. Discounted costs and life years gained reflect total costs and life years gained of a screening program, accounting for time preference for present over future outcomes. Quality-adjusted life years gained are plotted on the y-axis, and total costs are plotted on the x-axis. Each possible screening strategy is represented by a point. Strategies that form the solid line connecting the points lying left and upward are the economically rational subset of choices. This line is called the efficient frontier. The inverse slope of the line represents the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of the connected strategies. Points lying to the right and beneath the line represent the dominated strategies.