NEWS

In Brief

Katherine Arnold

Breast Cancer Screening Cost-Effective in Older Women

Breast cancer screening every 2 years in women age 65 and older reduces mortality at reasonable costs for otherwise healthy women, concluded a working group for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) using a statistical cost-effectiveness model.

The USPSTF recommends that women age 40 and older be screened with mammography for breast cancer every 1 to 2 years. However, the recommendation was based on studies that included few women older than age 65, so it remains unclear whether screening is cost-effective for women in this age group.

Members of USPSTF’s Cost Work Group reviewed 10 studies that included economic evaluations of breast cancer screening and included data for older women. They found that, overall, screening women ages 65 to 80 every 2 years resulted in incremental costs of about $34,000 to $88,000 per life-year saved compared with stopping screening at age 65. The authors note, however, that the harms begin to outweigh the benefits in the sickest women, such as those with dementia or those with a condition that limits their life expectancy to 5 years.

The review was published in the November 18 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

NCI-FDA Announce First Two Initiatives for Interagency Task Force

The National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have announced plans to develop a system to allow for electronic submission of investigational new drug (IND) applications and to start a training program for physicians and scientists to become experts in the regulatory approval process.

The two initiatives are the first steps of the two organizations’ Interagency Oncology Task Force, which was established in May with the goal of improving the efficiency of the drug development and approval processes.

The first of the recent NCI-FDA initiatives will focus on developing software to facilitate electronic interaction between the two agencies, with initial efforts to speed the processing of IND applications, which must be reviewed before new drugs can be studied in humans. The electronic filing system will be implemented under NCI’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), which is presently in pilot testing.

The second initiative, the Cancer Fellowship Training Programs, will allow fellows to work in clinical oncology programs at NCI and in the technical and regulatory review programs at the FDA.

See also News, Vol. 95, No. 16, p. 1192, "NCI, FDA to Collaborate on Speeding Up Drug Discovery."



             
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