Returning to work after parenting a child with the most curable chronic disease.

摘要

The financial costs incurred by families of children with cancer have been widely studied, as summarized and further studied by Limburg et al. in this issue of Pediatric Blood and Cancer. Even the most elusive component, out-of-pocket expenses, has been investigated, with estimates ranging from one quarter to one half of the total costs. The approximation depends in large part on estimates of loss of income during and after the cancer experience, which obviously are difficult to measure and quantify with respect to the duration of lost income and yet are critical to determine utility scores that can be used as weights on survival data to compute quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) . Limburg et al. study the latter aspect and have as their main positive finding that "although many parents temporarily leave their jobs after their child's diagnosis, the large majority (80%) were able to return to work when they choose to."