Misclassification of the actual causes of death and its impact on analysis: A case study in non-small cell lung cancer

Accurate estimation of long-term survival is crucial to the understanding of disease prognosis and cancer-specific mortality. However, what complicates the compilation of this data is the possibility of patients dying from causes unrelated to cancer. Patient with lung cancer, for example, die from either lung cancer or non-lung cancer causes. In these instances, when the occurrence of one outcome precludes the occurrence of the other, these two outcomes are considered competing events [1,2]. In the presence of competing events, epidemiologic studies commonly report cancer-specific mortality as the cumulative incidence of cancer-specific deaths.
Source: Lung Cancer - Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Source Type: research