Cancer survivors have poorer health outcomes than do similar individuals without cancer across multiple burden measures. These decrements are consistent across tumor sites and are found in patients many years following reported diagnosis. Improved measurement of long-term burden of illness will be important for future prospective research.
The preference-based chronic condition scores reported in this research are nationally representative and may be useful to researchers to calculate quality-adjusted life-years for cost-effectiveness analyses and population-based burden of illness studies without the difficulty of primary data collection. Further research is necessary to validate these scores in condition-specific studies.
This is one of the first sets of publicly available, nationally representative US values for any standardized HRQoL measure. These values are important for use in both generalized comparisons of health status and in cost-effectiveness analyses.
This study highlights patient interest in and the technical feasibility of offering presurgery BRCA1/2 testing to high-risk patients. Most importantly, these results demonstrate that BRCA1/2 test results significantly affect patients' surgical decision-making. The availability of genetic counseling and testing could serve as a valuable aid to patient decision-making for newly diagnosed breast cancer patients at high-risk for carrying a mutation.
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