Objective To systematically evaluate the pharmacoeconomic vaule of chemotherapy combined with rituximab for patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas (NHL). Methods A systematic literature search of cost-effectiveness studies on rituximab treating NHL published from 1998 to 2012 was carried out in following databases: PubMed, ScienceDirect, Health Technology Assessment (HTA) and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR). And the references of included studies were also retrieved manually. The studies were screened according to the pre-designed inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the incremental cost- effectiveness ratio (ICER) in comparison between chemotherapy plus rituximab and chemotherapy alone was systematically evaluated according to the literature evaluation index system. Results The average ICER of Rituximab treating NHL was 16 318/QALY, 17 688/QALY, and 22 461/QALY in the UK, Mainland Europe, and US, respectively. All the reported ICERs in the included studies were below the implemented country-specific thresholds. Conclusion Based on present foreign literature, the integrated therapy of chemotherapy and rituximab for NHL is supposed to be a better cost-effective therapy with ICER below the implemented country-specific thresholds.
