Information about mesothelioma available at http://www.mesothel.com/
R F Mould1, M Lahanas2, B Asselain3, D Brewster4, J A Burgers5, R A M Damhuis6, Y De Rycke3, V Gennaro7, N Szeszenia-Dabrowska8
1 UK
2 Klinikum Offenbach
3 Biostatisiques, Institut Curie, France
4 Director of Cancer Registration in Scotland, UK
5 Dept of Thoracic Oncology, Antoni van Leeuwenhook Ziekenhuis, The Netherlands
6 Integrated Cancre Centre Rotterdam (IKR), The Netherlands
7 Mesothelioma Registry of the Ligurian Region, National Cancer Research Institute, Genoa, Italy
8 National Institute of Occupational Medicine, Lodz, Poland
A truncated left-censored and right-censored lognormal model has been validated for representing pleural mesothelioma survival times in the range 5-200 weeks for data subsets grouped by age for males, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79 and 80+ years and for all ages combined for females. The cases available for study were from Europe and USA and totalled 5580. This is larger than any other pleural mesothelioma cohort accrued for study. The methodology describes the computation of reference baseline probabilities, 5-200 weeks, which can be used in clinical trials to assess results of future promising treatment methods. This study is an extension of previous lognormal modelling by Mould et al (2002 Phys Med Biol 47 3893-3924) to predict long-term cancer survival from short-term data where the proportion cured is denoted by C and the uncured proportion, which can be represented by a lognormal, by (1-C). Pleural mesothelioma is a special case when C=0.