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Wednesday, June 09, 2004Early-stage prostate cancer can lie in wait for more than a decade and then flare up to kill a man, a Swedish study finds. The study, which followed 223 men whose early-stage prostate cancer was left untreated, found that the tumor could suddenly become much more aggressive after 15 years -- a follow-up period much longer than that done in most such studies. But wait a minute. The study started with 223 men, but after fifteen years of observation, there were only forty-nine still alive. And it was only then that the prostate cancer mortality began to increase. Mostly because the small number of patients gave an artificial boost to the statistical manipulation: The prostate cancer mortality rate increased from 15 per 1000 person-years (95% confidence interval, 10-21) during the first 15 years to 44 per 1000 person-years... beyond 15 years of follow-up. When you convert numbers of deaths to "person years" from actual incidences, the numbers get conflated when the sample size is small. Most prostate cancers are still indolent. It's impossible to tell from the abstract, but chances are that most of the men in the study died of something other than prostate cancer. If one thing doesn't kill you, another one will. posted by Sydney on 6/09/2004 08:35:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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