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Abstract
It has been stated that breast cancer survival rates follow an exponential distribution.
This would mean that the mortality rate is constant. Survival distribution was analyzed
by the clinical life table method in one series of 10,752 patients and in another
of 656 patients followed up to 8 and 18 years, respectively. Part of the larger series'
table is
Necessarily, clinical survival data are censored progressively. These kinds of data
are analyzed best by examining the hazard function, which is the instantaneous death
rate, or force of mortality. If an exponential distribution described survival in
breast cancer correctly, the hazard function would be constant. These data clearly
are not consistent with an exponential distribution, as the hazard function decreases.
The survival distribution calculated from these data shows that the chance of dying
of cancer decreases the longer a patient survives. This is more optimistic and consistent
with clinical experience than is the exponential distribution.
Tabled
1
| Year | No. | Hazard | Year | No. | Hazard |
| 1 | 10,752 | 0.2424 | 5 | 507 | 0.0502 |
| 2 | 5,353 | 0.1114 | 6 | 251 | 0.0461 |
| 3 | 2,940 | 0.1048 | 7 | 96 | 0.0545 |
| 4 | 1,257 | 0.0703 | 8 | 14 | 0.0 |
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References
- Survival distribution.Ann Rev Biophys Bioeng. 1975; 4
- Cancer of the breast: Its outcome as measured by the rate of dying and causes of death.Ann Surg. 1975; 182: 334
- Theory and applications of hazard plotting for censored failure data.Technometrics. 1972; 14
Article info
Footnotes
☆Presented at the Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Central Surgical Association, Buffalo, N. Y., March 3–5, 1977.
Identification
Copyright
© 1977 Published by Elsevier Inc.
