Who in the United States will pay to live longer? From a recent Alabama study released this week, African American cancer patients are more willing than whites to exhaust their personal financial resources to extend life, according to a large observational study. Hispanic and Asian patients fell in the middle with 69.1% and 72% spending all they had respectively, reporting a similar willingness to use all of their resources to further extend life.

More than 4,200 lung and colorectal cancer patients were surveyed and it was found that 80% of black patients said they would spend it all to live longer. In white patients, 54.1% were willing to use all their savings to buy themselves additional time in this world.

To account for the possibility that type of insurance might account for racial and ethnic preferences, the researchers excluded Medicaid patients and those who did not report their insurance type.

By helping clinicians to understand patient preferences, the finding may help them to deliver quality cancer care. The study's authors stated:

"Understanding the cost at which people choose life extending treatment may play an important role in delivering patient centered cancer care. Our results highlight the complexity of treatment decisions and the factors that influence patient preferences. Understanding how treatment preferences align with the care that is actually delivered is an important aspect of delivering patient-centered care."

Aside from race and ethnicity, patients 55 years old or over were less likely to say they'd spend all they had. Also, participants were less willing to expend resources if they supported three or more people compared with those who supported just one.

Compared with patients who were married or living with a partner, divorced or separated people were more willing to spend resources to extend life, and those who thought their fate "was in God's hands" were more willing to spend resources than those who said they didn't know how long they had to live.

The study however did not examine trust in the healthcare system, experiences of discrimination, or religiosity, which all can be huge determining factors for individuals that have the option to prolong life or not. For example, views about death and dying differ among Asian subgroups such as Vietnamese and Japanese patients, Latino subgroups like Mexicans and Dominicans, and even among American blacks and Caribbean blacks all differ greatly.

Overall people want to live longer, but the cost may be enormous and create fallout in places one never expected.

Mapping the human genome and proteins, viewed by many scientists as a first step in prolonging life, is emerging as one of the most compute intensive tasks in history. The effort requires massive amounts of processing power coupled with unprecedented amounts of storage. While most companies are trying to consolidate their computing operations, proponents of genetic research are predicting an unprecedented expansion. They even anticipate a separate and distinct genomic economy.

Personal medicine, an understanding of who is prone to what diseases and what sorts of preventive supplements and activities can improve the odds of survival, all require humongous amounts of data. Whether a patient fully buys into the ability to actually prevent disease, or even whether this market becomes as lucrative as companies and scientists predict, there is no question that demands on computing, storage, power and software development will grow by orders of magnitude over the next decade as aging baby boomers retire from the workforce.

Sources: Cancer and Forbes

Sy Kraft