More Informative Picture Of Cancer Survival Shown Using New Statistical Technique
January 14th, 2008 by 
Barry - Admin BioPharmArena
Researchers have developed a new method for presenting clinical trial survival data that includes data from all trial participants unlike the standard method, according to a commentary published online January 8 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
In clinical studies, “time-to-event” data represents the time from the start of a study to an event, such as disease recurrence or death. But often many participants in a study do not experience an event before the study is over, so their survival time is not known. To overcome this data gap, the standard statistical method for presenting time-to-event results, known as the Kaplan-Meier survival curve, involves plotting the proportion of individuals surviving without an event over the period of the study. Using this method, researchers get an estimate of the median survival times. However, these plots also tend to make differences in survival between groups visually appear larger than they actually are.
To address this problem, Patrick Royston, D.Sc., of the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit in London and colleagues developed a new method for plotting survival as a bar graph and tested it on data from a kidney cancer trial. In cases where a participant had not experienced an event, the researchers estimated that person’s survival by using their prognosis and length of time in the trial.
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