A Simple, Test-Based Method to Control the Overestimation Bias in the Analysis of Potential Prognostic Tumour Markers.

ABSTRACT: The early evaluation of prognostic tumour markers is commonly performed by comparing the survival of two groups of patients identified on the basis of a cut-off value. The corresponding hazard ratio (HR) is usually estimated, representing a measure of the relative risk between patients with marker values above and below the cut-off. A posteriori methods identifying an optimal cut-off are appropriate when the functional form of the relation between the marker distribution and patient survival is unknown, but they are prone to an overestimation bias. In the presence of a small sample size, which is typical of rare diseases, the external validation sets are hardly available and internal cross-validation could be unfeasible. We describe a new method to obtain an unbiased estimate of the

SUBMITTER: Ognibene M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9953998 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature