Massively expensive new cancer drugs do extend the lives of patients significantly, a new study finds.
Critics of the new anticancer medications, whose prices have been rising by as much as 10 percent per year, have questioned whether their benefits justify the costs. But after assessing the price of the drugs and their effectiveness, researchers found that patients with breast cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer and chronic myeloid leukemia had big gains in life expectancy when treated with such drugs.
When researchers compared two periods — 1996 to 2000 and 2007 to 2011— they found a big difference in costs and lifespan between patients who got the new drugs and patients who didn’t.
Breast cancer patients who received doctor-administered drugs and care cost an average of $72,000 more over their lifetimes and lived 13.2 months longer. But for breast cancer patients who didn’t get the drugs, costs increased by just $8,900 and they lived two months more.
For kidney cancer patients treated with new drugs, lifetime costs increased by $44,700 and they lived 7.9 months longer, on average. Leukemia patients experienced the greatest effect from the new drugs, living 22.1 months longer on average and costing $142,200 more on average.
The increases in cost reflects a number of new anticancer drugs that have come on the market in the past 15 years, prompting a discussion in the healthcare community over whether they should be considered too expensive or whether they’re worth the cost.
The researchers, whose study was published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs, wrote that their findings “highlight the importance of considering outcomes and overall costs in routine practice when assessing the value of anticancer drugs as a group.”
“Our results also raise the question of whether back-of-the-envelope calculations based on drugs’ prices and the survival benefits reported in clinical trials provide an accurate measure of value,” they added.
The researchers used data from a Medicare database to conduct the study.
