Tools for cancer survival analysis
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Analysis program (strel) and life tables Relative survival is the ratio of the observed cumulative probability of survival in the study group and the survival that would have been expected if the group had only been subject to the background mortality in the general population (obtained from life tables). National, regional and other life tables are available here. Sub-national life tables have been smoothed either by applying Ewbank's 4-parameter model life table system to the observed mortality rates with the English Life Table 1991 as standard (archive), or by a poisson model (published in 2009). A Stata® command (ewblft) to perform the Ewbank procedure with your own data is available once you have registered. You will also have access to life tables we have constructed for England and Wales containing age-sex-mortality rates for five deprivation groups based on various indices of deprivation, by geographic region and calendar year or period. Life tables for Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are also available. Both strel and ewblft are copyright to the London School
of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. When you register to obtain access
you will be agreeing to accept the terms of the licences, so please
read them carefully. Modelling
relative survival in the presence of incomplete data: a tutorial
(linked to pubmed)
Ula Nur, Lorraine G Shack, Bernard Rachet, James R Carpenter and Michel P Coleman Missing data frequently create problems in the analysis of population-based data sets, such as those collected by cancer registries. We estimated relative survival for 29 563 colorectal cancer patients who were diagnosed between 1997 and 2004 and registered in the North West Cancer Intelligence Service. The method of multiple imputation (MI) was applied to account for the common example of incomplete stage at diagnosis, under the missing at random(MAR) assumption. MI greatly improved the results by exploiting all the information in the incomplete records. This method also helped to ensure efficient inferences about survival were made from the multivariate regression analyses.
Stata code used in this tutorial (pdf)
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