TUESDAY, Aug. 6, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Screening for cancer saves lives, but a new report shows it comes with a hefty price tag: The United States spends at least $43 billion annually on tests that check for five major cancers. Published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine , the new analysis focused on screenings for breast, cervical, colon, lung and prostate cancers.
Study lead author Dr. Michael Halpern , a medical officer in the National Cancer Institute’s health care delivery research program, told the New York Times that his team was surprised by the high cost. And some critics of the country's current amount of screening questioned whether the price tag was justified.
“What are we actually getting of value for that amount of money?” Dr. Adewole Adamson , a dermatology researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who studies screening, asked the Times. “If it was actually doing something I could say, ‘Yes, it is justified,’” he said.
However, studies have repeatedly failed to show that people live longer if they are screened, he said, and some cancers are just deadly from the start. “People have an outsized idea of what the benefits are,” Adamson said. But Karen Knudsen , chief executive of the American Cancer Society, stressed the value of cancer screening is clear.
“We are talking about people’s lives,” she said. “Early detection allows a better chance of survival. Full stop.
It’s the right thing to do for individuals.” “We s.