Assessing survival benefit when treatment delays disease progression.

ABSTRACT:

Background

For a potentially lethal chronic disease like cancer, it is often infeasible to compare treatments on the basis of overall survival, so a combined outcome such as progression-free survival (which is the time from randomization to progression or death) has become an acceptable primary endpoint. The rationale of using an efficacy measure that is dominated by the time to progression is that an effective treatment will delay progression and when treatment is stopped at progression, the effect of treatment after this time is small. However, often trials that show a significant benefit for delaying progression but not on overall survival are not universally viewed as providing convincing evidence that the drug should become the standard of care.

Methods

We propose that

SUBMITTER: Schoenfeld DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4995068 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature