survival rates – Page 2 – Oral Cancer News

Cost of cancer in the United States to go up, up, up

Source: www.medscape.com Author: Nick Mulcahy Because of the growth in the number of older Americans, there will be 18.1 million cancer survivors by 2020 in the United States — 4.3 million more than in 2010. And the associated costs of cancer care will be $157.77 billion — $33.20 billion more than in 2010, according to a new study published online January 12 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. However, these long-term cost projections assume that the incidence, survival, and annual costs remain the same, note the study authors, led by Angela Mariotto, PhD, from the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Mariotto and her colleagues also crunched the numbers in the event of an annual increase in costs. They estimate that the cost of care might increase annually by 2% in the initial and last-year-of-life phases of care. If such increases happen, then the total cost in 2020 is projected to be $173 billion, a 39% increase from 2010. These are conservative numbers, even with the 2% increase in annual costs, said a healthcare policy expert not involved in the study. The projected 2% annual cost increase should be considered a "lower bound or minimum estimate," Gary Lyman, MD, MPH, told Medscape Medical News. He is a senior fellow at the Duke Center for Clinical Health Policy Research in Durham, North Carolina. "The true increase in the cost of cancer to patients, families, and society is likely to be considerably greater over this period." The study's scenarios seem unlikely because [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2011-01-14T14:46:23-07:00January, 2011|Oral Cancer News|

Smoking may worsen pain for cancer patients

Source: www.medscape.com Author: Fran Lowry Patients with cancer who continue to smoke despite their diagnosis experience greater pain severity than their counterparts who quit or who have never smoked, according to new research published in the January 2011 issue of Pain. Not only is their pain more severe, but it interferes more with their activities of daily living, lead author Joseph W. Ditre, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Texas A & M University in College Station, told Medscape Medical News. "Many smokers, when they get cancer, feel that smoking is one of the only pleasures they have left to them and refuse to quit," he said in an interview. "But our research suggests that quitting has definite benefits. It’s one more thing that doctors can tell their patients to help them stop smoking." Continued smoking has been associated with an increased risk of developing a second primary tumor, reduces the effectiveness of treatment, and is associated with poorer survival rates, Dr. Ditre said. "The subtext for this is that smoking can also worsen cancer-related symptoms and treatment side effects, such as pain and fatigue." "About 75% of people with advanced-stage cancer report moderate to very severe pain, so it is a very big factor in terms of the disease course, and yet there is surprisingly little research on this topic," he added. Dr. Ditre, who led this work while he was earning his doctorate at the University of South Florida and Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, told Medscape Medical News [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2011-01-01T17:58:14-07:00January, 2011|Oral Cancer News|

Review: Erythropoietin could harm some cancer patients

Source: www.oncologynursingnews.com Author: staff A new review of data confirms that erythropoietin might be unsafe for people with head and neck cancers who receive the drug in combination with radiation: Radiation patients who were given erythropoietin had poorer outcomes than those who undergoing radiation treatment alone. The hormone erythropoietin is used to combat the anemia suffered by many people undergoing cancer treatment. Because severe anemia can lower the oxygen supply to tumor cells, decreased oxygen in these cells is associated with more rapid tumor progression and a poorer response to therapy. “It has therefore been thought logical that using erythropoietin to correct anemia before or during chemotherapy, radiotherapy, or both would improve the prognosis,” observed radiation oncologist Phillippe Lambin and colleagues from the MAASTRO (Maastricht Radiation Oncology) Clinic in the Netherlands. Their review was published in The Cochrane Library (July 2009, issue 3), a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Dr Lambin's team analyzed data from 5 published clinical trials involving nearly 1400 patients. The studies focused on whether combined radiation and erythropoietin was better than standard radiation therapy alone in the treatment of head and neck cancers. The reviewers learned that compared with patients who did not receive erythropoietin, those who did take it had significantly worse overall survival and significantly shorter times before their cancers worsened. Data included in the review suggested that the reduced survival rates in the erythropoietin patients were not due to some toxic effect of the drug itself, [...]

Oral Cancer Foundation News Team - A2009-09-10T07:30:55-07:00September, 2009|Oral Cancer News|