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The costs of cancer care in the U.S. are expected to increase rapidly, in part as a consequence of an aging population and novel diagnostic and therapeutic developments. However, such projections might be out of date, given recent changes in cancer incidence, survival, and patterns of care.
Now, investigators from the National Cancer Institute have drawn on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program data to estimate cancer prevalence and have used SEER–Medicare linkage data to estimate future annualized net costs of care. Patients were classified according to site of first cancer diagnosis from 1975 to 2005. Projections of prevalence were classified according to three phases of care: the initial year after diagnosis, the …