What is relative survival and what is its role in haematology?

Pohar Perme, Maja (author), Wreede, Liesbeth C. de (author), Manevski, Damjan (author)

In many haematological diseases, the survival probability is the key outcome. However, when the population of patients is rather old and the follow-up long, a significant proportion of deaths cannot be attributed to the studied disease. This lessens the importance of common survival analysis measures like overall survival and shows the need for other outcome measures requiring more complex methodology. When disease-specific information is of interest but the cause of death is not available in the data, relative survival methodology becomes crucial. The idea of relative survival is to merge the observed data set with the mortality data in the general population and thus allow for an indirect estimation of the burden of the disease. In this work, an overview of different measures that can be of interest in the field of haematology is given. We introduce the crude mortality that reports the probability of dying due to the disease of interest; the net survival that focuses on excess hazard alone and presents the key measure in comparing the disease burden of patients from populations with different general population mortality; and the relative survival ratio which gives a simple comparison of the patients' and the general population survival. We explain the properties of each measure, and some brief notes are given on estimation. Furthermore, we describe how association with covariates can be studied. All the methods and their estimators are illustrated on a sub-cohort of older patients who received a first allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for myelodysplastic syndromes or secondary acute myeloid leukemia, to show how different methods can provide different insights into the data.

• Language: English
• Keywords: survival analysis, haematological diseases, mortality tables, relative survival, net survival, competing risks
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: MF - Faculty of Medicine
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2023
• Number of pages: 11 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 36, iss. 2, art. 101474
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-148276
• UDC: 616.1
• ISSN on article: 1532-1924
• DOI: 10.1016/j.beha.2023.101474
• COBISS.SI-ID: 151566851
• Publication date in RUL: 09.08.2023

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Best practice & research clinical haematology
• Shortened title: Baillière's best pract. res. clin. haematol.
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 1532-1924
• COBISS.SI-ID: 151558659

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: analiza preživetja, hematološke bolezni, tabele smrtnosti

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: P3-0154
• Name: Metodologija za analizo podatkov v medicini

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: J3-1761
• Name: Število izgubljenih let kot mera bremena bolezni