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Written By: Agencies | Updated : September 14, 2015 2:54 PM IST
Cancer is a deadly disease with treatments that have disastrous side effects.When a near one suffers from a disease this deadly, it just doesn't remain limited to the patients but it takes a toll on the family members too. Another important aspect of this disease is the expenditure that entails. The treatment is expensive and if one is not medically insured, the disease becomes quite a burden. And there are high chances that the treatment is delayed because of financial aspects. Supporting these aspects, a new study claims that various social factors like income, marital status and insurance affect the chances of survival in young patients with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, a study has found.
Researchers analysed data from 5,541 patients younger than 65 years. They found that AML patients who were single or divorced, patients who were uninsured, and patients who lived in areas with lower income had substantially elevated risks of dying prematurely. We believe these three factors indicate lack of material and social support preventing young patients from successfully walking the long and difficult road towards a cure, said lead author of the study Uma Borate, assistant professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham in the US. Wondering if eating avocados can keep leukaemia at bay? Here's your answer.
Over the years, tremendous progress in AML treatment has been made in identifying disease characteristics that cause a patient to have a higher or lower chance of cure following intense treatment, which often involves bone marrow transplantation. But the new findings suggest that in addition to age and disease characteristics, other non-biological patient characteristics also matter. Did you know that mutation causing leukaemia exist in most elderly people?
As physicians, we often emphasise more of the biology of the cancer, especially with the recent focus on personalised medicine. But we need to pay the same attention to resources available to our patients, as this greatly impacts their chances to survive leukemia, senior author Luciano Jose Costa, associate professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham said. Source: IANS Image source: Getty Images
