ABSTRACT
Typical health resource use in a breast cancer trial might include: first-line chemotherapy, radiotherapy, additional chemotherapy, treatments for adverse events, genetic testing, surgical procedures, duration of hospital stay, and hospital outpatient appointments or day care. Health resource use monitoring is particularly important in cancer trials where a patient can undergo several lines of treatment between periods of stable disease and progressive disease. A key consideration is to determine how in the future, downstream costs associated with an experimental cancer treatment compare to those in the control arm. Cancer suspicion is high, and a number of tests, imaging, and surgical procedures are undertaken to get a final diagnosis and cancer stage. Sometimes the costs of a performing a clinical trial can get tangled up with the costs related to the consequences of delivering the treatment. In many clinical trials the intent to treat population is often the primary population for analysis.
