Methods for evaluating the proportion of cancer patients who are cured
Dr Bernard Rachet and Dr Anjali Shah
Collaboration with Dr Paul Lambert, Centre for Biostatistics & Genetic Epidemiology, University of Leicester and Dr Paul Dickman, Therese Andersson and Sandra Eloranta, Karolinska Institute, Sweden
The aims of this project are to develop statistical methods for estimating and modelling the cure fraction in population-based cancer survival analysis and apply the methods to data from Sweden, Finland, England and the USA with the joint aim of evaluating the new methodology as well as studying temporal trends in cancer patient survival.
Traditional approaches to studying temporal trends in cancer patient survival typically involve estimating 5-year relative survival for different periods of diagnosis and attempting to correlate the observed trends with changes in factors thought to affect survival. A common problem is that an observed trend may be consistent with several competing hypotheses.
An alternative approach, which we believe provides greater insights, is to simultaneously estimate the proportion of patients cured along with the distribution of survival times of the 'uncured'. Studying trends in both the cure fraction and the average survival time of the uncured gives greater possibilities for distinguishing between competing explanations for an observed trend in patient survival.
