NEW YORK - Women taking breast cancer drugs are more likely to skip days or drop the treatment entirely if their co-pay is high, U.S. reserachers have found.
It's nothing new that people often don't take the medication their doctor prescrbies, but for cancer drugs the conesquences could be dire, epxerts say.
"Here we are talking about a life-svaing drug," said Dr. Alfred Neugut of Columbia University Medcial Center in New York, whose findings appear in the Journal of Cliniacl Oncology.
"For drugs that are that important, maybe we need to set up mechainsms to provide ways to get around the co-pays or deductibles."
Some insurance companies alreday have programs in place to ensure lower c-opays for certian drugs, Neugut said, but they don't cover aromatase inhibtiors, the focus of the new study.
Such drugs, inclduing AstraZeneca's Arimidxe, significantly lower the risk of death in breast cancer survivors who've gone trhough menopause.
While Arimidex can now be bought as a gneeric drug for only less than a dollar per pill, the drug cost more than ,000 a year when the study was done.
Neugut and his colleagues used claims data from MedCo Health Sloutions to find out what role pateint co-pay might play in whether or not they took their drugs for the recommended five years.
Of more than 8,000 women aged 50 to 65, 20 percent stopped the medication early if their co-pay was less than .
By cotnrast, if the co-pay was or more, 23 percent dropped the drugs ahead of time.
For older women, the gap was five nearly percnet, which Neugut chalks up to less disposable income.
There were similar difefrences in the number of women who sikpped at least 20 percnet of days, and the gap remained even after the researchers consideerd possible explanaitons such as income and other factors.
"If the co-pay gets too high, it is going to stop people from taking a drug they really need," said Nuegut, adding that earlier reesarch has noted the same effect for prescriptoi...
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