Work

Assessing the Benefits and Burdens of Preventive Interventions

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Cancer prevention is recognized as a key strategy for reducing disease incidence, mortality, and the overall burden on individuals and society. However, determining when to begin preventive interventions presents a significant challenge: starting too early may lead to more interventions and increased lifetime burdens due to repeated administrations, while delaying may miss opportunities to prevent cancer. Evidence-based recommendations require a benefit-burden analysis that weighs life-years gained against the burden of interventions. With the growing availability of large-scale observational data, there is now an opportunity to empirically evaluate these trade-offs. In this paper, we propose a causal framework for assessing the benefit and burden of cancer prevention, using an illness-death model with semi-competing risks. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed estimators are unbiased, with robust inference across realistic scenarios. We apply this approach to a benefit-burden analysis of the preventive screening for colorectal cancer, utilizing data from the large-scale Women's Health Initiative. Our findings suggest that initiating screening at age 50 years achieves the highest life-year gains with an acceptable incremental burden-to-benefit ratio compared to no screening, contributing valuable real-world evidence to the field of preventive cancer interventions.

Source: Statistics in Medicine

DOI: 10.1002/sim.70410

Authors: Yi Xiong, Kwun C. G. Chan, Malka Gorfine, Li Hsu

Institutions: University at Buffalo, State University of New York, University of Washington, Tel Aviv University, Fred Hutch Cancer Center

Language: English

Topic: Global Cancer Incidence and Screening

Subfield: Oncology

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green