Primary Submission Category: Chronic disease
Timing of cancer across the life course: long-term consequences for socioeconomic outcomes
Authors: Amanda Thomas Eric Grodsky Chandra L. Muller John Robert Warren
Presenting Author: Amanda Thomas*
Over the course of a lifetime almost 40% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer. Due to advancements of treatments and therapies, more than 5% of the US population are cancer survivors. Despite the size of this population subgroup, little is known about the influence of cancer diagnosis and treatment timing on socioeconomic attainment due in part to few datasets having the breadth of longitudinal information needed to address these questions. Moreover, prior research has not considered heterogeneity in the effects of cancer diagnosis across racial/ethnic, gender, education, and family socioeconomic background groups.
Utilizing the High School and Beyond (HSB) dataset—a large (n~25,500) nationally representative cohort study of high school sophomores and seniors followed from 1980 through 2022—we evaluate the impact of cancer diagnosis in early- and mid-life on later life social and economic outcomes, specifically occupational status, earnings, and financial security. Additionally, we consider how these effects differ across racial/ethnic, gender, education, and family background groups.
From approximately 13,900 respondents to the 2021/2022 survey, nearly 13% (n = 1770) described ever being diagnosed with cancer. Another 490 cohort members died from various forms of cancer by 2021/2022. The most common cancers reported were skin (n = 630), breast (n=350) and prostate/vaginal (n=150 each). For roughly one-third of patients their cancer was diagnosed in adolescence or young adulthood (≤ 39 years old). Our outcomes—measured at age ~60 in 2021/2022—include occupational socioeconomic standing, income, financial precarity, and marital status. Our analyses will model these outcomes as a function of age and type of cancer diagnosis (net of key confounders) and will handle selective mortality from cancer in earlier years. They will then consider heterogeneity in these processes across population subgroups.