Biostatistics 203. Survival analysis.

Since survival time is a quantitative variable, why can’t we just use the usual techniques from Table I? Before we explain the main reason why we use survival analysis, let’ us consider a simple example on the survival times (in months) for 25 lung cancer patients who all died; the timings are : 1, 5, 6, 6, 9, 10, 10, 10, 12, 12, 12, 12, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 24, 27, 32, 34, 36, 36, 44 months. Performing a simple descriptive, we have n = 25, mean (sd) = 17.52 (11.48) months and median = 12 months.