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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Caring for elderly people with cancer is a costly proposition.
According to researchers who analyzed federal data on about 719,000 people with cancer and more than 1.6 million similarly aged people without the disease, cancer care costs the Medicare program more than $21 billion over five years of treatment. The highest costs come during the first year after diagnosis and in the persons last year of life.
Some cancers, however, run up bigger bills than others. For example, the typical breast cancer or melanoma case costs about $20,000 over five years, compared with the typical lymphoma, brain, or nervous system cancer case, which racks up more than $40,000. The highest costs in the study were seen for lung, colorectal and prostate cancers.
The authors believe these findings are important because cancer cases are expected to rise as the population continues to age.
Fellow investigator Joseph Lipscomb, Ph.D., from Emory University of Atlanta, agrees in an accompanying editorial. Few of these individual findings are startling; yet taken together, they provide the scientifically strongest picture yet of the incidence costs of cancer in aggregate and by tumor type for the elderly in the United States, Dr. Lipscomb was quoted as saying.
Younger people werent included in the study, but the researchers suspect their costs are even higher because younger people often opt for more aggressive care. The introduction of new and more costly treatments could be exacerbating the financial picture even further.
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SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, published online April 29, 2008
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