Economic burden of gastrointestinal cancer: estimation and importance

The economic burden of gastrointestinal (GI) cancer in the world is substantial and expected to increase significantly in the future due to expected growth the incidence rate of GI cancers especially in developing countries and the improvements in survival time and trends in treatment patterns, costs of care following cancer diagnosis and use of expensive technologies and medications. The rising cost of GI cancer treatment poses a significant challenge to health system, government and private insurers, and individual patients. In this paper, we describe how to measures the economic burden of GI cancer and also we discuss the importance of estimating the economic burden of GI cancer.