WASHINGTON – The hours spent sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms, in line for the CT scan, watching chemotherapy drip into veins: Battling cancer steals a lot of time – at least $2.3 billion worth for patients in the first year of treatment alone.
So says the first study to try to put a price tag to the time that people spend being treated for 11 of the most common cancers.
Even more sobering than the economic toll are the tallies, by government researchers, of the sheer hours lost to cancer care: 368 hours in that first year after diagnosis with ovarian cancer; 272 hours being treated for lung cancer, 193 hours for kidney cancer.
That doesn’t count the days spent home in bed recovering from surgery or weak from chemo, just time spent actively getting care – chemo or radiation therapy, blood tests or cancer scans, surgery or checkups, driving to medical appointments and waiting your turn.
The study shedding new light on the human costs of cancer was being published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Cancer institute epidemiologist Robin Yabroff and colleagues culled the records of 763,000 cancer patients covered by Medicare and estimated the time involved in traveling to, waiting for and receiving both in-hospital and outpatient care. They compared the results with time spent in medical care by 1 million other Medicare recipients without cancer.
Although most of these patients were retired, the researchers assigned a monetary value to their time – $15.23 an hour, the median U.S. wage rate in 2002. Then they estimated the national toll by including the number of patients diagnosed with cancer in 2005.
It is almost certainly an underestimate, the researchers said, noting that younger cancer patients often receive more intensive treatment.
Men with prostate cancer spent 55.3 more hours getting medical care in the first year after diagnosis, compared with similar people without cancer. Breast cancer patients spent 66.2 hours. Also, both groups spent about four days in the hospital.
Ovarian cancer patients struggled the most, spending about 21 days in the hospital that first year, and 368 extra hours getting care. Gastric cancer and lung cancer patients fared almost as badly, spending about 21 days and 15 days in the hospital, respectively, and 351 and 272 hours in treatment.
The shortest treatment time was for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, at 17.8 hours the first year.
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