An ad-hoc committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will address the following objectives:
1. Provide an overview of the current status of the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of adult cancers including, but not limited to, breast cancer and lung cancer, and the relative levels of associated functional limitation typically associated with these cancers, common treatments, and other considerations in the U.S. population age 18 and older;
2. Identify adult cancers with recent advances in treatment or changes in prognosis, including but not limited to breast cancer, and lung cancer, and describe to the degree possible:
a. The professionally accepted diagnostic techniques used in identifying adult cancers (for example, laboratory and clinical findings);
b. The stages of adult cancers, how the stages are determined (for example, by specific laboratory findings), and what the stages mean in terms of treatment and prognosis;
c. Clinical standards for identifying complete remission or cure, and variability in the time period used to identify remission, the difference between complete remission and partial remission (if appropriate), and the consequences of partial remission (for example, if partial remission results in a reduction in type or intensity of treatment);
d. Secondary impairments that result from either the cancer or the treatment (for example, cognitive impairment following certain treatment); and
e. Common long-term and late effects of the cancer or therapy.
3. Identify the types of treatments available and describe to the degree possible:
a. The clinical practice guidelines for receiving the treatments;
b. The settings in which the treatments are provided;
c. What receipt of the treatments indicates about the severity of the medical condition; and
d. The likelihood of improvement when receiving the treatments and the period over which the improvement would be expected;
4. Provide a summary of selected treatments currently being studied in clinical trials for adult cancers; and
5. Provide the median survival time and survival rates dependent on the stage and the type of cancer (including area of body affected).
The report will include conclusions but not recommendations.
The committee shall not describe issues with respect to access to treatments. While the Social Security Administration (SSA) recognizes people may have difficulty accessing care or particular forms of treatment, some do successfully access those treatments. SSA may receive information about those treatments in the medical records SSA considers when making disability determinations and conducting continuing disability reviews (CDRs). SSA understands improvement is not certain in all cases. SSA makes individual decisions on each case based on all the evidence they receive.