This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Neurology  • Cerebrovascular Disease  • Stroke  • Arrhythmias  • Cardiovascular Intervention  • Thrombolysis  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In Reply: We suspect that many physicians share the opinion of Drs Perret-Guillaume and Wahl that the utility of warfarin therapy that we used seemed too high, since physicians tend to be more averse to warfarin therapy than are patients with atrial fibrillation.¹ As physicians, we need to take care that our own preferences (or our personal desire to avoid monitoring warfarin) do not usurp our patients’ preferences.

Similarly, as researchers, we need to conduct studies that minimize interviewer bias. Thus, the 1996 study² elicited utilities for warfarin, aspirin, and stroke using a computer-aided utility assessment tool, U-Titer.³ U-Titer was used to standardize the description of warfarin therapy and to iteratively determine utilities on a quality-of-life scale ranging from 0 (tantamount to death) to 1 (ideal health). The mean utility of warfarin from the 70 participants was 0.987, the value that we used in the base case analysis in the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Cara L. O’Brien, MD
Internal Medicine Residency Program
Duke University
Durham, NC

Brian F. Gage, MD, MSc
bgage@im.wustl.edu
Washington University School of Medicine
St Louis, Mo

RELATED ARTICLES

Cost-effectiveness of Ximelagatran for Stroke Prevention
Christine Perret-Guillaume and Denis Wahl
JAMA. 2005;293(23):2860-2861.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Costs and Effectiveness of Ximelagatran for Stroke Prophylaxis in Chronic Atrial Fibrillation
Cara L. O’Brien and Brian F. Gage
JAMA. 2005;293(6):699-706.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT