Health & Medical Cancer & Oncology

Survival After Surviving -- Estimating Late Recurrence Risk

Survival After Surviving -- Estimating Late Recurrence Risk


Hello. I'm Dr Maurie Markman from Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Philadelphia. I want to briefly discuss a very interesting paper that appeared last month in the Journal of Clinical Oncology: "Prognosis and Conditional Disease-Free Survival Among Patients With Ovarian Cancer." Although this is a fairly complex title, what the paper looks at is a very important and rather simple issue.

We always base our report to patients—when they ask for survival data—upon the time of diagnosis. A patient may say, or a family member may say, diagnosis has been made of ovarian cancer. What are the chances of somebody living without evidence of recurrence for 5 years? We have a lot of data on that. We can report it.

But what this study looked at is a different question and also a very important question. It helps us when the patient asks, "I have this disease and I've done very well for 2 years or 3 years. What are my chances now of going 5 years total without having evidence of recurrence of the cancer?" The answer is, we actually don't record that kind of information. But it's important to know, and certainly patients ask about it.

In this paper, looking at a large dataset of patients with ovarian cancer, the authors pose that very question and they demonstrate that the probability of surviving an additional 3 years without recurrence of ovarian cancer, conditioned on already having survived 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years after remission, was 63.8%, 80.5%, 90.4%, 97%, and 97.7%, respectively.

Clearly very different from what you would say to a patient at the time of initial diagnosis with advanced disease.

I think this is a very interesting report. I encourage individuals who are interested in this question of prognosis and conditional disease-free survival among patients with ovarian cancer—and potentially other diseases—to review this paper. I would argue that this is the kind of analysis that is very important, and I think patients and their families would find it very informative as they think about their futures.

Thank you for your attention. I encourage you to read this interesting paper and I look forward to your comments, which you can enter below.

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