Financial toxicity and symptom burden: what is the big deal?

Excerpt

There is great interest currently on the issue of financial toxicity (FT) in cancer care with research papers, commentaries, and press articles on the topic substantially growing. The term ‘FT’ is used to describe the financial distress or hardship as an outcome of cancer treatment [1]. Alleviating the impact of FT requires knowledge of how health services are organised and funded within the respective health system and the efforts of numerous groups including policy makers, clinicians, advocacy groups, and industry. The supportive care community has taken the mission of lessening the negative impact of FT very seriously. Regardless of how it is measured, relatively high levels of FT are experienced by oncology patients and their caregivers [1]. Our recent systematic review of the FT literature found that the frequency of FT ranged from 28 to 48% using monetary measures like percentage of household income, and 16 to 73% using self-report measures such as impacts on everyday living expenses [1]. …