Errors in determination of net survival: cause-specific and relative survival settings.
Journal
British journal of cancer
ISSN: 1532-1827
Titre abrégé: Br J Cancer
Pays: England
ID NLM: 0370635
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
03 2020
03 2020
Historique:
received:
28
06
2019
accepted:
17
01
2020
revised:
07
01
2020
pubmed:
11
2
2020
medline:
16
1
2021
entrez:
11
2
2020
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
Cause-specific and relative survival estimates differ. We aimed to examine these differences in common cancers where by possible identifying the most plausible sources of error in each estimate. Ten-year cause-specific and relative survival were estimated for lung, breast, prostate, ovary, oesophagus and colorectal cancers. The cause-specific survival was corrected for misclassification of cause of death. The Pohar-Perme relative survival estimator was modified by (1) correcting for differences in deaths from ischaemic heart disease (IHD) between cancers and general population; or (2) correcting the population hazard for smoking (lung cancer only). For all cancers except breast and prostate, relative survival was lower than cause-specific. Correction for published error rates in cause of death gave implausible results. Correction for rates of IHD death gave slightly different relative survival estimates for lung, oesophagus and colorectal cancers. For lung cancer, when the population hazard was inflated for smoking, survival estimates were increased. Results agreed with the consensus that relative survival is usually preferable. However, for some cancers, relative survival might be inaccurate (e.g. lung and prostate). Likely solutions include enhancing life tables to include other demographic variables than age and sex, and to stratify relative survival calculation by cause of death.
Sections du résumé
BACKGROUND
Cause-specific and relative survival estimates differ. We aimed to examine these differences in common cancers where by possible identifying the most plausible sources of error in each estimate.
METHODS
Ten-year cause-specific and relative survival were estimated for lung, breast, prostate, ovary, oesophagus and colorectal cancers. The cause-specific survival was corrected for misclassification of cause of death. The Pohar-Perme relative survival estimator was modified by (1) correcting for differences in deaths from ischaemic heart disease (IHD) between cancers and general population; or (2) correcting the population hazard for smoking (lung cancer only).
RESULTS
For all cancers except breast and prostate, relative survival was lower than cause-specific. Correction for published error rates in cause of death gave implausible results. Correction for rates of IHD death gave slightly different relative survival estimates for lung, oesophagus and colorectal cancers. For lung cancer, when the population hazard was inflated for smoking, survival estimates were increased.
CONCLUSION
Results agreed with the consensus that relative survival is usually preferable. However, for some cancers, relative survival might be inaccurate (e.g. lung and prostate). Likely solutions include enhancing life tables to include other demographic variables than age and sex, and to stratify relative survival calculation by cause of death.
Identifiants
pubmed: 32037401
doi: 10.1038/s41416-020-0739-4
pii: 10.1038/s41416-020-0739-4
pmc: PMC7109046
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
1094-1101Références
Crowder M. J. Classical Competing Risks. (Chapman and Hall/CRC, USA, 2001)
Ederer, F., Axtell, L. M. & Cutler, S. J. The relative survival rate: a statistical methodology. Natl Cancer Inst. Monogr. 6, 101–121 (1961).
pubmed: 13889176
Perme, M. P., Stare, J. & Estève, J. On estimation in relative survival. Biometrics 68, 113–120 (2011).
doi: 10.1111/j.1541-0420.2011.01640.x
Sasieni, P. & Brentnall, A. R. On standardized relative survival. Biometrics 73, 473–482 (2017).
doi: 10.1111/biom.12578
Sarfati, D., Blakely, T. & Pearce, N. Measuring cancer survival in populations: relative survival vs cancer-specific survival. Int J. Epidemiol. 39, 598–610 (2010).
doi: 10.1093/ije/dyp392
Percy, C., Stanek, E. & Gloeckler, L. Accuracy of cancer death certificates and its effect on cancer mortality statistics. Am. J. Public Health 71, 242–250 (1981).
doi: 10.2105/AJPH.71.3.242
Welch, H. G. & Black, W. C. Are deaths within 1 month of cancer-directed surgery attributed to cancer? J. Natl Cancer Inst. 94, 1066–1070 (2002).
doi: 10.1093/jnci/94.14.1066
Andersen, P. K., Geskus, R. B., de Witte, T. & Putter, H. Competing risks in epidemiology: possibilities and pitfalls. Int J. Epidemiol. 41, 861–870 (2012).
doi: 10.1093/ije/dyr213
Mariotto, A. B., Noone, A. M., Howlader, N., Cho, H., Keel, G. E., Garshell, J. et al. Cancer survival: an overview of measures, uses, and interpretation. JNCI Monogr. 2014, 145–186 (2014).
doi: 10.1093/jncimonographs/lgu024
Ellis, L., Coleman, M. P. & Rachet, B. The impact of life tables adjusted for smoking on the socio-economic difference in net survival for laryngeal and lung cancer. Br. J. Cancer 111, 195–202 (2014).
doi: 10.1038/bjc.2014.217
Barry, M. J., Andriole, G. L., Culkin, D. J., Fox, S. H., Jones, K. M., Carlyle, M. H. et al. Ascertaining cause of death among men in the prostate cancer intervention versus observation trial. Clin. Trials 10, 907–914 (2013).
doi: 10.1177/1740774513498008
Chamberlain, J., Coleman, D., Ellman, R. & Moss, S. Verification of the cause of death in the trial of early detection of breast cancer. UK Trial of Early Detection of Breast Cancer Group. Trial Co-ordinating Centre. Br. J. Cancer 64, 1151–1156 (1991).
doi: 10.1038/bjc.1991.480
Doria-Rose, V. P., Marcus, P. M., Miller, A. B., Bergstralh, E. J., Mandel, J. S., Tockman, M. S. et al. Does the source of death information affect cancer screening efficacy results? A study of the use of mortality review versus death certificates in four randomized trials. Clin. Trials 7, 69–77 (2010).
doi: 10.1177/1740774509356461
Goldoni, C. A., Bonora, K., Ciatto, S., Giovannetti, L., Patriarca, S., Sapino, A. et al. Misclassification of breast cancer as cause of death in a service screening area. Cancer Causes Control 20, 533–538 (2009).
doi: 10.1007/s10552-008-9261-3
Holmberg, L., Duffy, S. W., Yen, A. M., Tabar, L., Vitak, B., Nystrom, L. et al. Differences in endpoints between the Swedish W-E (two county) trial of mammographic screening and the Swedish overview: methodological consequences. J. Med Screen 16, 73–80 (2009).
doi: 10.1258/jms.2009.008103
Horeweg, N., van Klaveren, R. J., Groen, H. J., Lammers, J. W., Weenink, C., Nackaerts, K. et al. Blinded and uniform cause of death verification in a lung cancer CT screening trial. Lung Cancer 77, 522–525 (2012).
doi: 10.1016/j.lungcan.2012.04.018
Kilpelainen, T. P., Makinen, T., Karhunen, P. J., Aro, J., Lahtela, J., Taari, K. et al. Estimating bias in causes of death ascertainment in the Finnish Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer. Cancer Epidemiol. 45, 1–5 (2016).
doi: 10.1016/j.canep.2016.08.022
Loffeler, S., Halland, A., Weedon-Fekjaer, H., Nikitenko, A., Ellingsen, C. L. & Haug, E. S. High Norwegian prostate cancer mortality: evidence of over-reporting. Scand. J. Urol. 52, 122–128 (2018).
doi: 10.1080/21681805.2017.1421260
Makinen, T., Karhunen, P., Aro, J., Lahtela, J., Maattanen, L. & Auvinen, A. Assessment of causes of death in a prostate cancer screening trial. Int J. Cancer 122, 413–417 (2008).
doi: 10.1002/ijc.23126
Miller, A., Feld, R., Fontana, R., Gohagan, J., Jatoi, I., Lawrence, W. Jr et al. Changes in and Impact of the Death Review Process in the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial. Rev. Recent Clin. Trials 10, 206–211 (2015).
doi: 10.2174/1574887110666150730120752
Turner, E. L., Metcalfe, C., Donovan, J. L., Noble, S., Sterne, J. A., Lane, J. A. et al. Contemporary accuracy of death certificates for coding prostate cancer as a cause of death: Is reliance on death certification good enough? A comparison with blinded review by an independent cause of death evaluation committee. Br. J. Cancer 115, 90–94 (2016).
doi: 10.1038/bjc.2016.162
Walter, S. D., de Koning, H. J., Hugosson, J., Talala, K., Roobol, M. J., Carlsson, S. et al. Impact of cause of death adjudication on the results of the European prostate cancer screening trial. Br. J. Cancer 116, 141–148 (2017).
doi: 10.1038/bjc.2016.378
Yousaf-Khan, A. U., van der Aalst, C. M., Aerts, J., den Bakker, M. A. & de Koning, H. J. Uniform and blinded cause of death verification of the NELSON lung cancer screening participants. Lung Cancer 111, 131–134 (2017).
doi: 10.1016/j.lungcan.2017.07.018
Atkin, W. S., Edwards, R., Kralj-Hans, I., Wooldrage, K., Hart, A. R., Northover, J. M. A. et al. Once-only flexible sigmoidoscopy screening in prevention of colorectal cancer: a multicentre randomised controlled trial. Lancet 375, 1624–1633 (2010).
doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)60551-X
World Health Organisation. WHO: International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision. (WHO, Geneva,1992)
Department for Communities and Local Government. Indices of Deprivation. (2010)
Poole J., Bannon F., McPhail S., Barclay M., Coleman M. P., Emmett M., et al. Standard Operating Procedure: Guidelines on Population Based Cancer Survival Analysis. (2016).
Howlader, N., Ries, L. A., Mariotto, A. B., Reichman, M. E., Ruhl, J. & Cronin, K. A. Improved estimates of cancer-specific survival rates from population-based data. J. Natl Cancer Inst. 102, 1584–1598 (2010).
doi: 10.1093/jnci/djq366
Dickman, P. W. & Coviello, E. Estimating and modeling relative survival. Stata J. 15, 186–215 (2015).
doi: 10.1177/1536867X1501500112
Schaffar, R., Rachet, B., Belot, A. & Woods, L. M. Estimation of net survival for cancer patients: Relative survival setting more robust to some assumption violations than cause-specific setting, a sensitivity analysis on empirical data. Eur. J. Cancer 72, 78–83 (2017).
doi: 10.1016/j.ejca.2016.11.019
Makkar, N., Ostrom, Q. T., Kruchko, C. & Barnholtz-Sloan, J. S. A comparison of relative survival and cause-specific survival methods to measure net survival in cancer populations. Cancer Med. 7, 4773–4780 (2018).
doi: 10.1002/cam4.1706
Sasieni, P. D., Adams, J. & Cuzick, J. Avoidance of premature death: a new definition for the proportion cured. J. Cancer Epidemiol. Prev. 7, 165–171 (2002).
pubmed: 12846487
Withrow, D. R., Pole, J. D., Nishri, E. D., Tjepkema, M. & Marrett, L. D. Choice of relative or cause-specific approach to cancer survival analysis impacts estimates differentially by cancer type, population, and application: evidence from a Canadian population-based cohort study. Popul Health Metr. 15, 24 (2017).
doi: 10.1186/s12963-017-0142-4
Hinchliffe, S. R., Rutherford, M. J., Crowther, M. J., Nelson, C. P. & Lambert, P. C. Should relative survival be used with lung cancer data? Br. J. Cancer 106, 1854 (2012).
doi: 10.1038/bjc.2012.182
Talbäck, M. & Dickman, P. W. Estimating expected survival probabilities for relative survival analysis – exploring the impact of including cancer patient mortality in the calculations. Eur. J. Cancer 47, 2626–2632 (2011).
doi: 10.1016/j.ejca.2011.08.010
Ellison, L. F. Adjusting relative survival estimates for cancer mortality in the general population. Health Rep. 25, 3–9 (2014).
pubmed: 25408490
Seppa, K. & Hakulinen, T. Mean and median survival times of cancer patients should be corrected for informative censoring. J. Clin. Epidemiol. 62, 1095–1102 (2009).
doi: 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2008.11.010