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To the Editor: As authors of 7 of the original US studies included in the meta-analysis of cancer and employment by Dr de Boer and colleagues,¹ we question the interpretation of our data and the authors' interpretation of their own findings. First, our research did not study "unemployment" among cancer survivors. Unemployed people are looking for work and cannot find it. Very few of the nonworking survivors in our studies were looking for work. Many had retired, some were disabled or in treatment, and others shifted to other pursuits. It would be misleading to suggest that survivors are turned down for jobs more frequently than the general population.

Second, a meta-analysis of these studies incorrectly aggregates and oversimplifies the trajectory from cancer diagnosis to employment outcomes. Research on this topic has progressed from describing cancer's overall effect on employment to tracing out effects from treatment to long-term survivorship^2-3 and isolating . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Pamela Farley Short, PhD
Department of Health Policy and Administration
Pennsylvania State University
University Park

Cathy J. Bradley, PhD
cjbradley@vcu.edu
Massey Cancer Center
Richmond, Virginia

K. Robin Yabroff, PhD
Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences
National Cancer Institute
Bethesda, Maryland

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