OBJECTIVES: The increasing development of EQ-5D-Y utilities is set to inform youth-related healthcare decisions worldwide. However, it is not entirely clear how the general public’s preferences for EQ-5D-Y health states vary across countries. Recently, an EQ-5D-Y valuation study involving four Asian jurisdictions, namely, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam, were completed. Thus, the study aimed to compare composite time trade-off-based (cTTO) EQ-5D-Y value sets across the four Asian jurisdictions.

METHODS: In each jurisdiction, around 200 general public members were quota sampled to ensure national-representativeness. The international EQ-5D-Y valuation protocol was used, but with minor change involving the cTTO design. Respondents were administered 10 to 13 cTTO questions by trained interviewers. cTTO data was modelled using an 8-parameter censored random effects cross-attribute level effects (CALE) model and model performance evaluated using the out-of-sample predictive accuracy. The value sets for the four jurisdictions were cross compared in terms of value characteristics.

RESULTS: The censored random effects CALE model fitted all four datasets relatively well, exhibited good model performance, displayed coefficient monotonicity, and so was used for the cross-comparison analysis. Vietnam and Taiwan had the highest (-0.295) and lowest (-0.614) model-predicted 33333 value, with the least (5.76%) and most (19.75%) negative values respectively. The values and percentages for Malaysia and Singapore were -0.334 (7.41%) and -0.435 (11.11%), respectively. The four value sets exhibited different weights on the five dimensions.

CONCLUSIONS: In general, the tendency to sacrifice life to avoid children from living in poor health states differed across the studied jurisdictions. Valuation studies conducted in similar settings still differ vastly in terms of health preferences for EQ-5D-Y health states. This phenomenon resonated with previous Asian population studies involving preferences towards adult EQ-5D-5L health states, stressing the need for population-specific value sets.