Is the cost of anticancer therapy justified?
This article was originally published in Scrip
Executive Summary
We all know that cardiovascular disease and cancer are the biggest causes of death in the developed world, but other types of disease impose a much greater overall burden of morbidity. For example, Datamonitor figures show that in the US in 2013 a total of 168.2 million patients were recorded with metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis and lipid disorders, while 144.5 million patients were affected by CNS disorders that varied from migraine, depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. In contrast, only 1.2 million cancer patients were recorded in the US in the whole of 2013. Cardiovascular disease came somewhere in between, with 85.1 million patients recorded with conditions such as hypertension, acute coronary syndrome, atrial fibrillation, myocardial infarction and stroke.