Euthanasia, religiosity and the valuation of health states: results from an Irish EQ5D5L valuation study and their implications for anchor values

Background The Quality Adjusted Life Year influences the allocation of significant amounts of healthcare resources. Despite this surprisingly little research effort has been devoted to analysing how beliefs and attitudes to hastening death influence preferences for health states anchored at “dead” and “perfect health”. In this paper we examine how, inter alia, adherence to particular religious beliefs (religiosity) influences attitudes to euthanasia and how, inter alia, attitudes to euthanasia influences the willingness to assign worse than dead (WTD) values to health states using data collected as part of the Irish EQ5D5L valuation study.