Cancer takes colossal toll on time

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 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 the 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 recovering, just time spent actively getting care.

It's a study, to be published today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, that sheds new light on the human costs of cancer.

"What we see here is a measure of the patient's burden of commitment," wrote Drs. Larry Kessler of the Food and Drug Administration and Scott Ramsey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in an accompanying editorial.

"Cancer is more than just the dollars and cents for the medicines and the treatments and the doctors. It's also the lost opportunities for the patients," added Dr. Len Lichtenfeld of the American Cancer Society.

NCI epidemiologist Robin Yabroff and colleagues culled the records of 763,000 cancer patients covered by Medicare, the government's insurance program for those 65 and older, and estimated the time involved in traveling to, waiting for, and receiving both in-hospital and outpatient care.

The researchers assigned a monetary value to their time -- $15.23 an hour, the median US 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.