TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lichtenberg, Frank R
TI  - The Impact of Biomedical Knowledge Accumulation on Mortality: A Bibliometric Analysis of Cancer Data
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19593
PY  - 2013
Y2  - October 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19593
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19593
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19593.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Frank R. Lichtenberg
Columbia University
318 Uris Hall
3022 Broadway
New York, NY  10027
Tel: 212/854-4408
Fax: (212) 854-9895
E-Mail: frl1@columbia.edu
M1  - published as Frank R. Lichtenberg. "The Impact of Biomedical Research on U.S. Cancer Mortality: A Bibliometric Analysis," in Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt, and David M. Cutler, editors, "Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs" University of Chicago Press (2018)

M3  - presented at "Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs", October 18-19, 2013
AB  - I examine the relationship across diseases between the long-run growth in the number of publications about a disease and the change in the age-adjusted mortality rate from the disease.  The diseases analyzed are almost all the different forms of cancer, i.e. cancer at different sites in the body (lung, colon, breast, etc.).  Time-series data on the number of publications pertaining to each cancer site were obtained from PubMed.  For articles published since 1975, it is possible to distinguish between publications indicating and not indicating any research funding support.  

My estimates indicate that mortality rates: (1) are unrelated to the (current or lagged) stock of publications that had not received research funding; (2) are only weakly inversely related to the contemporaneous stock of published articles that received research funding; and (3) are strongly inversely related to the stock of articles that had received research funding and been published 5 and 10 years earlier.  The effect after 10 years is 66% larger than the contemporaneous effect.  The strong inverse correlation between mortality growth and growth in the lagged number of publications that were supported by research funding is not driven by a small number of outliers.
ER  -