Abstract
Is the value of being healthy the same across all ages? The paradigm of QALY's to date have assumed this to be true, and do not discriminate between a QALY to an elderly and a QALY to a child. But on the other hand, it is possible, as has been done in DALY's (Disability Adjusted Life Years), to think of the value being different according to the age. This paper introduces a Dutch empirical study on the value of health at different ages, and reports on the results of its reproduction in Japan.
There are three hypotheses to be tested: 1. That the relative value of health will decrease with age; 2. That this negative correlation will be independent of the respondent's age; 3. That relative age values can be expressed in interval scales. In the original Dutch study, nore of the three hypotheses were rejected. In Japan, the results depended on the respondent's age. A negative age-value profile was obtained from the younger respondents but the profile from the elder respondents had a peak around age 35. The third hypothesis cannot be rejected, but it should be noted that there was a large variation in the responses.
There were many responses in the reproduction which could not be quantified, and an additional series of non parametric analyses were carried out in order not to waste the preference information collected.
