Blogger's Note: although ovarian cancer data is not included - interesting (but not surprising)
Current Oncology (open access-register first)
....our publication results are restricted to Canada and the United
States, and therefore our results might not be generalizable to other
parts of the world.
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(My) Blogger's Key Points:
Although our study does not establish a causal relationship, those data
suggest a significant disconnect between the public health burden from
various cancers and the relative research intensity.
Here, we evaluated whether clinical cancer research
output (total publications and number of clinical trials) is
proportional to the public health burden (measured by mortality) for 10
major cancers in Canada and the United States. We also explored the
relationship between research funding and research output.
Although the volume of scientific publications is often used as a metric
for research productivity, the extent to which volume correlates with
improvements in human health is not known. Furthermore, the use of a
journal’s impact factor as an indicator of research quality has critical
limitations4,14,15.
.... When adjusting for years of life lost, they found that breast cancer and
leukemia received a relatively higher degree of funding and that lung
cancer was underfunded. They modelled disease burden using years of life
lost and mortality, and concluded that both measures provide valuable
insight into the population burden of cancer and should be considered in
the allocation of cancer research funding. Building on that work,
Carter and Nguyen evaluated funding allocations by the U.S. National
Cancer Institute11.
They found considerable mismatch between funding levels and disease
burden. Breast cancer, prostate cancer, and leukemia were funded at
levels higher than their relative burden, while bladder, esophagus,
liver, oral, pancreatic, and uterine cancers were relatively
underfunded.
Breast cancer and prostate cancer received $73,036,061 and $36,297,058
(Canada) in research funding respectively—about 8 times and 4 times the amount
that would be proportional to their corresponding cancer mortality.
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ABSTRACT
Purpose
The relative distribution of research output across
cancer sites is not well described. Here, we evaluate whether the
volume of published research is proportional to the public health burden
of individual cancers. We also explore whether research output is
proportional to research funding.
Methods
Statistics from the Canadian and American cancer
societies were used to identify the top ten causes of cancer death in
2013. All journal articles and clinical trials published in 2013 by
Canadian or U.S. authors for those cancers were identified. Total
research funding in Canada by cancer site was obtained from the Canadian
Cancer Research Alliance. Descriptive statistics and Pearson
correlation coefficients were used to describe the relationship between
research output, cancer mortality, and research funding.
Results
We identified 19,361 publications and 2661 clinical
trials. The proportion of publications and clinical trials was
substantially lower than the proportion of deaths for lung (41% deaths,
15% publications, 16% clinical trials), colorectal (14%, 7%, 6%),
pancreatic (10%, 7%, 5%), and gastroesophageal (7%, 5%, 3%) cancers.
Conversely, research output was substantially greater than the
proportion of deaths for breast cancer (10% deaths, 29% publications,
30% clinical trials) and prostate cancer (8%, 15%, 17%). We observed a
stronger correlation between research output and funding (publications r = 0.894, p < 0.001; clinical trials r = 0.923, p < 0.001) than between research output and cancer mortality (r = 0.363, p = 0.303; r = 0.340, p = 0.337).
Conclusions
Research output is not well correlated with the
public health burden of individual cancers, but is correlated with the
relative level of research funding.
INTRODUCTION
....Relative to other diseases, oncology has greater
relative funding and a disproportionate representation in higher-impact
medical journals
6.
However, within oncology, the number of publications4,6, clinical trials7, and research funding8–11
might not be distributed across cancer sites relative to the burden of
disease. To our knowledge,
no published study has described the
interrelationships of disease burden, research output, and research
funding within oncology. For the present study, we evaluated whether the
volume of published cancer research is proportional to the public
health burden by cancer site. We also explored whether research output
is proportional to research funding by cancer site.
We hypothesized that
cancer research output (total publications and clinical trials) does
not reflect the relative mortality for the various disease sites, but is
more reflective of available research funding......
Identifying Cancers with the Greatest Public Health Burden
Using 2013 statistics from the Canadian Cancer
Society and the American Cancer Society, we identified the cancers
responsible for the greatest number of deaths in Canada and the United
States
2,
12.
A priori,
we excluded non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, and liver or intrahepatic
biliary cancer from our study because those malignancies have multiple
subtypes, and we did not feel that our bibliometric search would
accurately identify related research output. Thus, the top 10 cancers,
by mortality, considered here are lung, colorectal, breast, prostate,
pancreatic, bladder, gastroesophageal, melanoma, kidney, and uterine
cancers.
