HER2 Support Group Forums - View Single Post - CLT Ann

12-10-2005, 05:36 PM

Heres another one.

RB

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/la...38708/fulltext

The Lancet 2000; 356:1270-1271
DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)73870-8
Breast cancer survival advantage with radiotherapy
Sean Bydder a, Nigel Spry a, David J Joseph a and Hany Elsaleh a
Sir
The method used by the EBCTCG1 to define cause of death: “all deaths after recurrence were classified as breast cancer deaths”, is potentially flawed. This assumes that no recurrences are salvageable, which may be untrue, especially for the breast conservation trials. Patients who develop a local recurrence within a conserved breast, have a quite different outlook to women who develop metastatic disease as their first relapse. Because radiotherapy reduces the recurrence rate by a third, the proportion of patients in the control groups whose cause of death is misclassified by this assumption is much larger than in the radiotherapy groups. Because the percentage difference in breast cancer deaths was relatively small (18•6% vs 21•3%), this classification procedure alone could account for the difference.

12-10-2005, 05:36 PM	#4
Unregistered Guest Posts: n/a	Heres another one. RB http://www.thelancet.com/journals/la...38708/fulltext The Lancet 2000; 356:1270-1271 DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)73870-8 Breast cancer survival advantage with radiotherapy Sean Bydder a, Nigel Spry a, David J Joseph a and Hany Elsaleh a Sir The method used by the EBCTCG1 to define cause of death: “all deaths after recurrence were classified as breast cancer deaths”, is potentially flawed. This assumes that no recurrences are salvageable, which may be untrue, especially for the breast conservation trials. Patients who develop a local recurrence within a conserved breast, have a quite different outlook to women who develop metastatic disease as their first relapse. Because radiotherapy reduces the recurrence rate by a third, the proportion of patients in the control groups whose cause of death is misclassified by this assumption is much larger than in the radiotherapy groups. Because the percentage difference in breast cancer deaths was relatively small (18•6% vs 21•3%), this classification procedure alone could account for the difference.