On 1 September, an international team of researchers from the public-private ROADMAP project published a new paper on the ethics of health outcome prioritisation in Alzheimer´s disease (AD) in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. In their paper, the scientists focus on the ethical landscape related to health outcome prioritisation. In the context of the project, outcome prioritisation relates to ranking disease-related objectives and their associated cost or risk. In order to better understand the landscape, the team conducted a narrative review of literature that was published since 2007. In doing so, they identified eight areas of ethical salience for outcome prioritisation:
1) Public health and distributive justice,
2) Scarcity of resources,
3) Heterogeneity and changing circumstances,
4) Knowledge of treatment,
5) Values and circumstances,
6) Conflicting priorities,
7) Communication, autonomy and caregiver issues, and
8) Disclosure of risk.
Concluding, the team stated that the emerged eight areas highlight the difficult balance when allocating resources, measuring and prioritising outcomes and when seeking individual preferences. The full article has been published open access and can be read here: https://doi.org/10.3233/JAD-191300
This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 116020 (“ROADMAP”). This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA.
