Tag: "cancer"

Cancer Study Authors Respond to Critics

In a recent Health Affairs paper, we documented that the United States has a significant survival advantage over much of Europe when it comes to cancer: 1.8 years for those diagnosed during our study window. Furthermore, we showed over a 17-year period that this gap had widened, not narrowed, and that this widening was more valuable than traditional health valuation approaches suggest. As a result, we argued that the additional spending in the United States was ‘worth it.’

 These results have generated a lot of controversy, and even some criticism. We understand the controversy given the impression that U.S. health care spending is too high. However, we find the criticism both irrelevant and misguided, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

More on cancer care in the United States and Europe at the Health Affairs blog.

May 24, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Employers as Insurance Companies

We find evidence that women more dependent on their own job for health insurance reduce their labor supply by less after a diagnosis of breast cancer – the estimate difference is about 5.5 to 7 percent. Women’s subjective responses to questions about working more to maintain health insurance are consistent with the conclusions from observed behavior.

 NBER Study byCathy J. Bradley, David Neumark, and Scott Barkowski.

May 21, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Gambles Cancer Patients are Willing to Take

77 percent of surveyed cancer patients preferred “hopeful gambles” –treatments that offer a 50 percent chance of adding three years to their survival but also a 50 percent chance of no additional survival – to “safe bet” treatments that would keep them alive for eighteen months.

Full Health Affairs study on “hopeful gambles” vs. “safe bets”.

May 07, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Cancer Society Chief Says More Screening Will Save More Lives

The American Cancer Society recommends yearly mammograms, starting at age 40 and continuing for as long as a woman is in good health.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that women 50 to 74 get a mammogram every two years.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force study in 2009 recommended against mammograms for asymptomatic women in their 40s. The task force also recommended that women 75 and older not be screened regularly for breast cancer.

More on breast cancer screenings in the Dallas Morning News.

Apr 18, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Aspirin

The Good:

After just three years of daily aspirin use, the risk of developing cancer was reduced by almost 25 percent when compared with a control group not taking aspirin.

The Bad:

Now some scientists think low doses may work if they’re taken every day; American clinical trials of every-other-day aspirin had no effect on cancer rates at all.

The Ugly:

Public health experts worry about widespread use of aspirin, because the drug increases the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding, ulcers and hemorrhagic strokes that can be fatal. An analysis in Archives of Internal Medicine in January found that for every 162 people who took aspirin, the drug prevented one nonfatal heart attack but caused about two serious bleeding episodes.

More from Roni Caryn Rabin in The New York Times.

Apr 12, 2012 | 4 comments | by

Cancer Treatment Costs are Worth It

[T]he cost of cancer treatment in the United States was higher than such care in ten European countries from 1983 to 1999. However, they also found that for most cancer types investigated, U.S. cancer patients lived longer than their European counterparts. Cancer patients diagnosed during 1995-99, on average, lived 11.1 years after diagnosis in the United States, compared to just 9.3 years from diagnosis in Europe.

The researchers concluded that by standard metrics that value additional years of life in dollar terms, U.S. cancer patients paid more but achieved better results in terms of longevity. Even after considering higher U.S. costs for treatment, their calculations showed the extra longevity was worth an aggregate of $598 billion — an average of $61,000 for an individual cancer patient. The value of additional survival gains was highest for prostate cancer patients ($627 billion) and breast cancer patients ($173 billion).

Full Health Affairs study worth reading.

Apr 11, 2012 | 11 comments | by

Cancer Studies Cannot Be Replicated

The bad news:

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications — papers in top journals, from reputable labs — for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A solution suggested by Arnold Kling:

If government and other funders of research were to shift more resources toward replication, this would do two things. First, it would catch more bad science sooner. Second, it would take away some of the incentive to do bad science, because it would raise the risk of getting caught.

Apr 02, 2012 | 7 comments | by

Medicaid Cancer Study

Tell me again why I should be glad that 16 million new people are going to be enrolled in Medicaid?

Medicaid patients had worse survival rates than the rest of the study sample, which included both those with private insurance and with no coverage at all. The disparities persisted even after the researchers controlled for where patients live, how much education they had received and the income level of their neighborhoods.

More on this study, and full article by Sarah Kliff in The Washington Post.

Feb 21, 2012 | 7 comments | by

Health Spending Has Been Slowing For More Than A Decade

The reason: technology and patient power:

Contrary to the perennial doomsaying, the health-care system is—almost in spite of itself—getting better. A generation of breakthrough drugs for chronic disease, mental illness, HIV and cancer were developed in the 1980s and ’90s at great cost. Dozens of these drugs—like Zocor for heart disease or Zyprexa for schizophrenia—are now widely available, many in generic form. There are now countless electronic ways of telling patients about them. And health insurers are driven by their own evolving market disciplines to make sure patients start taking them and keep taking them in the cheapest available versions.

Combine all these new medicines, information channels and business compulsions with the slow, steady transfer of economic responsibility for health care—from corporate and government bureaucrats to consumers and their families—and suddenly health-care starts to look almost like an actual market.

More from J.D. Kleinke in The Wall Street Journal.

Feb 17, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Can Tiny Amounts Of Poison Actually Be Good For You?

Biology professor Paul Z. Myers of the University of Minnesota describes an animal study in which fish embryos experience non-linear toxicity from alcohol, a toxin that causes severe deformities in zebrafish embryos at high doses and prolonged exposure. According to Myers, “I’ve done concentration series, where we give sets of embryos exposures at increasing concentrations, and we get a nice linear curve out of it: more alcohol leads to increasing frequency and severity of midline and branchial arch defects. With one exception: at low concentrations of about 0.5% alcohol, the treated embryos actually have reduced mortality rates relative to the controls, and no developmental anomalies.” Similarly, in experiments by Ronald Chesser, a radiation biologist at Texas Tech University, and his colleagues, mice exposed to low doses of radiation around Chernobyl for 10 to 45 days became resistant to damage from a higher, acute radiation dose delivered later in the lab.

Hormesis appears to result from a kind of overcompensation that explains the enhanced protective mechanisms elicited by small amounts of a toxin. That is, protective mechanisms are activated to a greater degree than would be necessary merely to neutralize the insult, resulting in a beneficial effect.

Full Henry Miller column in Forbes.

Jan 06, 2012 | 5 comments | by
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