ASO Authors Reflections: Patient Age and Survival After Surgery for Esophageal Cancer

Excerpt

Curatively intended esophagectomy, currently the most effective treatment for locally advanced esophageal cancer, is an extensive procedure with high risks of serious and sometimes lethal complications.1 The short-term safety and long-term benefits of esophagectomy in older people are controversial. The decision as to whether to recommend esophagectomy or not in older patients may be better informed if the patient’s risk of mortality after surgery is available. One key measure is the change over time of the probability of dying and how this may differ across age groups. This study aimed to quantify this probability by using a novel statistical method, the event-probability regression.2^,3 This method can estimate the mortality risk, properly defined as the probability of dying at any given time point for those who are still alive at that point (working paper: http://​www.​imm.​ki.​se/​biostatistics/​eventprob/​Working_​paper_​2020.​pdf). This estimated risk is bounded between zero and one, and can model odds ratios of mortality as a function of time and patients’ characteristics, such as age. Event-probability regression can be easily estimated with the Stata command “stpreg” available at http://​www.​imm.​ki.​se/​biostatistics/​eventprob. …