Hi I wonder if any one can help? I asked oncologist how much chemo would reduce the chance of reccurance and she said 'oh it’s around 5%, not much really". How do they work this out as I have noticed some people saying 15/25% ?.
Hi Susy,
This is a question that is often asked as information can be confusing and bewildering. There are lots of different sets of statistics poeple quote and sometimes it’s easy to end up comparing ‘apples’ with ‘oranges’ (two different things) if we aren’t careful.
There are three different online tools that can be used to investigate the likely efficacy of treatment, and it’s probably worth noting that an increase in survival (not the same as recurrence) of 3% or more is generally the trigger for chemo. This may not sound like much but it is 3% aboslute. So, for example if a person’s survival stats were 50% without chemo they would be 53% with it - a ~6% increase in relative terms. If the maths leaves you cold, fear not, you won’t be alone.
The online tools:
NHS Predict is a very simple to use tool where you just type in your information and it comes up with survival stats. predict.nhs.uk/predict.shtml
CancerMath is a very simalar US tool lifemath.net/cancer/
Adjuvant Online is essentially what hospitals use, and you have to regsiter to use it by saying you are a meidcal professional, i’m told they never check and a lot of people have registered (I haven’t). I think this one can give recurrence stats too. adjuvantonline.com/index.jsp
If you use them they may give you slightly different results from each other due to the underlying algortihms and validation data.
Try not to worry too much about the data or results - remember someone is always going to be in the good part of the data, and that someone could very easily be you.
Hope that helps a bit.
Thank you so much for your quick response Revcat much appreciated x