We appreciate Dr. Wechowski's interest (1) in our study (2) and agree that it is important to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of screening for pre-diabetes and of diabetes prevention on a country-by-country basis. Cost-effectiveness ratios may vary between countries because of differences in the costs of diabetes intervention, screening, general treatment, and related complications and because of differences in the prevalence of pre-diabetes.

We agree with Dr. Wechowski that the differences between his analysis for the U.K. (3) and our analysis for the U.S. are unlikely due to time horizon. Adding younger cohorts to our analysis may increase the cost-effectiveness ratio somewhat but will have relatively little effect on our overall ratio because so many overweight and obese patients are in the 45–74 years age range that we used in our analysis. Although Dr. Wechowski assumed that a more costly screening strategy was applied, adopting such a strategy would not dramatically increase our cost-effectiveness ratio; we found that doubling screening costs increased the ratio only modestly.

1.
Wechowski, J: The cost-effectiveness of screening for pre-diabetes among overweight and obese U.S. adults (Letter).
Diabetes Care
31
:
e34
,
2008
. DOI:
2.
Hoerger TJ, Hicks KA, Sorensen SW, Herman WH, Ratner RE, Ackermann RT, Zhang P, Engelgau MM: The cost-effectiveness of screening for pre-diabetes among overweight and obese U.S. adults.
Diabetes Care
30
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2874
–2879,
2007
3.
Wechowski J, McEwan P: Cost-utility of identifying patients with impaired glucose tolerance and their subsequent treatment with intensive lifestyle intervention to delay the onset of type 2 diabetes in the UK setting. Paper presented at the IV Annual Health Technology Assessment Meeting, Barcelona, 17–20 June 2007, Barcelona, Spain