Date: 2014-09-26

Time: 15:30-16:30

Location: BURN 1205

Abstract:

In palliative care studies, the primary outcomes are often health related quality of life measures (HRLQ). Randomized trials and prospective cohorts typically recruit patients with advanced stage of disease and follow them until death or end of the study. An important feature of such studies is that, by design, some patients, but not all, are likely to die during the course of the study. This affects the interpretation of the conventional analysis of palliative care trials and suggests the need for specialized methods of analysis. We have developed a “terminal decline model” for palliative care trials that, by jointly modeling the time until death and the HRQL measures, leads to flexible interpretation and efficient analysis of the trial data (Li, Tosteson, Bakitas, STMED 2012).

Speaker

Tor Tosteson is a professor in the Department of Community and Family Medicine and Director of Biostatistics Shared Resource at the Norris Cotton Cancer and the Biostatistics Consulting Core of the Dartmouth Clinical and Translational Institute, Lebanon, NH.