Our summary
Over the past decade, the treatment landscape for metastatic breast cancer (mBC) has evolved, leading to notable changes in clinical practice and treatment costs. In fact, medical expenditures for breast cancer are the highest across all cancer types. Existing publications that have aimed to estimate costs associated with mBC lack the information needed to accurately estimate the up-to-date financial burden of these therapies by line and subtype.
Using contemporary real-world data (RWD), researchers from Yale School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Flatiron Health explored national treatment patterns of mBC, including drug regimen frequency, sequence, and duration of use, and downstream health system and societal costs.
Why this matters
This study highlights the growing financial burden of mBC treatment, including the heterogeneity across time and subtypes, and enabled a more accurate cost-effectiveness analysis of novel anti-cancer and supportive therapies. Accurate characterization of current cancer costs is pivotal in evaluating the financial burden of these therapies faced by payers, patients, and health systems, and to inform policy.