Advances in Statistical Methods for the Health Sciences: Applications to Cancer and AIDS Studies, Genome Sequence Analysis, and Survival Analysis

Studies of prognosis have received rather little attention by those carrying out systematic reviews. Such reviews are increasingly being attempted but the poor quality of published ‘primary’ studies leads to serious difficulties. Thus there have been calls for such reviews to be based on individual patient data (IPD) but such studies are as yet rare. We consider the advantages of IPD for reviews of prognostic variables and describe in detail a systematic review of microvessel density counts as a prognostic variable for patients with non-small cell lung cancer. We show that such a study is feasible, but note that it may not be cost-effective to attempt to obtain all relevant data.

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