Not a MyNAP member yet? Register for a free account to start saving and receiving special member only perks. Improved diagnosis and more effective treatments are helping decrease cancer mortality, with a corresponding increase in the number of cancer survivors.
Many people are living with and beyond cancer, with implications for their long-term ability to adequately perform normal activities, including work. This chapter provides an overview of cancer-related impairments that may be caused by the disease itself or produced by cancer treatments.
These impairments may be clustered or overlap, and in many cases are both acute and chronic. For each impairment, the committee discusses interventions that, with adequate implementation, can help mitigate it. Given the U. The term. SSA does not require a diagnosis for disability eligibility but instead relies on objective medical evidence to establish the existence of a medically determinable impairment.
Most recently, the National Academies completed a new report, Selected Health Conditions and Likelihood of Improvement with Treatment NASEM, , which identified disabling long-term medical conditions including cancer in adults that are likely to improve with treatment. The report addressed several cancers of relevance to this committee, including breast cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, and head and neck cancers. The committee carefully considered the findings and conclusions of that National Academies report when preparing this chapter, and some of the information presented here is derived from that report.
In , at the request of SSA, the National Academies report Functional Assessment for Adults with Disabilities reviewed the literature on the functional assessment of physical and mental abilities relevant to work requirements and the function and impairment trajectories in individuals with back disorders, cardiac impairments, depression, and traumatic brain injury NASEM, Although that report did not assess cancer-specific impairments, many of the concepts and assessment tools are applicable to individuals with cancer see Figure The many instruments available to assess both physical and mental functional abilities in the research and clinical setting were reviewed in detail.
