FINDINGS

First Year of Cancer Is Costly in Lost Time

One of the biggest costs of fighting cancer is lost time -- sitting in doctors' waiting rooms, in line for a CT scan, watching chemotherapy drip into veins -- and a new study puts a price tag on it: $2.3 billion in the first year after the disease is diagnosed.

Even more sobering than the economic toll are the tallies, by government researchers, of the hours lost to cancer care: 368 hours in the first year after diagnosis with ovarian cancer; 272 hours being treated for lung cancer; 193 hours for kidney cancer.

Those figures do not count the days spent home in bed recovering from surgery or weak from chemotherapy, just time spent actively receiving care, including driving to appointments and hospitals.

The new study, published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, probably underestimates the time costs of seeking treatment, epidemiologist Robin Yabroff said. The data she used did not include patients younger than 65, who are more likely to seek aggressive and time-consuming treatments. It also did not look at the value of time spent by a patient's family members. The researchers assigned a monetary value to their time -- $15.23 an hour, the median U.S. wage in 2002. Then they estimated the national toll by including the number of patients whose cancer was diagnosed in 2005.

-- From News Services