UroToday.com – Patients often ask at what milestone year after treatment for cancer they might consider their risk to be minimal for a recurrence. This time point decreases much of the anxiety patients live with. There is little information about the conditional probability of death among patients greater than 5 years after a diagnosis of cancer.
A study in the online edition of Cancer, by Dr. Anne-Marie Bouvier and associates used a French national database to estimate the conditional probabilities of death for cancers of the breast, prostate, colon and lung in France.
The database included 205,562 incident cancer cases diagnosed between 1989 and 1997 in patients 15 years of age and older in 12 French administrative areas that cover 15% of the French population. The relative survival was defined as the ratio of the observed survival in the cancer patients under study to the expected survival of a general population with similar sex, age and year of death. This reflects the excess mortality in the cancer patient group relative to the background mortality. The probability of death between time t0 and t1, conditional on having survived until t0, is related directly to the excess mortality rate.
For prostate cancer, the 5-year relative survival rate differed according to age at diagnosis, increasing from 70% in men age
Bouvier AM, Remontet L, Hédelin G, Launoy G, Jooste V, Grosclaude P, Belot A, Lacour B, Estève J, Bossard N, Faivre J; for The Association of the French Cancer Registries (FRANCIM)
Cancer. 2009 Jun 30. (Epub ahead of print)
10.1002/cncr.24489
Written by UroToday.com Contributing Editor Christopher P. Evans, MD, FACS
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