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. 2022 Dec 15;12:28. doi: 10.1186/s40945-022-00154-1

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© The Author(s) 2022

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

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Fig. 1 — How utilities are tallied up to calculate QALYs. 1a & 1b: QALYs are calculated 2 dimensionally, using an ‘area under the curve’ method, so 1 year at full health is 1 QALY, and 2 years at utility of 0.5 is also 1 QALY. 1c illustrates the ‘area under the curve’ in a hypothetical study that followed people until death, with interim follow-up data collection points at 1, 5, and 8 years. We see that the control group experienced 3.95 QALYs and the treatment group experienced 5.95 QALYs, so the QALY gain from treatment (the area in green) is approximately 2.0 QALYs