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Cancer survivors more likely to be unemployed
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Results from a meta-analysis and meta-regression study suggest cancer survivorship is associated with unemployment among people aged younger than 65 years — especially for survivors of breast and gastrointestinal cancers.
“Apart from the effects on employment, there are probably long-term effects of cancer on work ability, work capacity and wage losses for a large group of survivors,” researchers wrote.
Researchers from various institutions in Europe conducted a meta-analysis to examine the risk factors associated with unemployment among adult cancer survivors compared with healthy control participants.
The researchers pooled data from 26 articles, which included results of 36 studies of 177,969 participants; 20,366 people were cancer survivors and 157,603 were healthy controls.
Results indicated that cancer survivors were 1.37 times more likely to be unemployed when compared with healthy controls (33.8% vs. 15.2%; RR=1.37; 95% CI, 1.21-1.55).
An additional analysis found an even greater risk for unemployment for survivors of breast cancer (35.6% vs. 31.7%; RR=1.28; 95% CI, 1.11-1.49), gastrointestinal cancers (48.8% vs. 33.4%; RR=1.44; 95% CI, 1.02-2.05) and cancers of the female reproductive organs (49.1% 38.3%; RR=1.28; 95% CI, 1.17-1.40).
The risk for unemployment was 1.5 times higher for cancer survivors in the United States — which has a relatively low background unemployment rate — when compared with survivors in Europe (RR=1.48; 95% CI, 1.15-1.95). However, this risk disappeared after adjustment for diagnosis, age and background unemployment rate (RR= 1.24; 95% CI, 0.85-1.83).
JAMA. 2009;301:753-762.