Talk:Progression-free survival

Definition
Is PFS reduced by deaths due to side effects of the treatment ? Rod57 (talk) 23:59, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

In clinical trials, that depends on the pre-assigned rules for how to count deaths possibly caused by treatment, and whether they are an 'event' in statistical analyses after the fact, or if they are 'censored'. There's no one answer-- it will depend on the treatment more than anything and whether death due to treatment is expected and to what degree it is expected. Kenzie.one (talk) 15:34, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

No definition
This article is marred by the fact that it does not precisely define "Progression free survival".

In particular, the article needs to specify precisely when a patient has been deemed to "progress". It appears from an amateur and cursory glance at the literature that subject to some conditions the prevailing definition is a 20% increase in sum-of-diameters of target tumors from the lowest reading on study, which may or may not be the patient's first reading on study.

It would be nice if an expert would verify this and make this article more precise!

There is no single definition nor a single measurement of PFS. It is instead a collection of various measurements and imaging techniques that are collected and simplified into the single value "Progression Free Survival", either by the primary investigators or by an independent group. For solid tumors, the RECIST guidelines have been created by the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer to help unify measurements of PFS in the study of chemotherapeutic agents. However, PFS has not been strictly limited to studying solid tumors. Just one example, PFS has been used as a primary end point in a study on Cystic Fibrosis: http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/34/5/1079.full Sheldahl (talk) 16:07, 18 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi, this is an older issue, so apologies for being 6 years late, but Sheldah is correct, there is no single definition; within clinical trials, 'progression' is defined separately per trial and deaths on study, deaths due to treatment, deaths due to complications that may have been caused by treatment (pneumonia in an elderly cancer patient could be random or the treatment or the cancer), QOL decline may be an event, etc etc. It is very dependent on the disease being studied and the treatments used. Kenzie.one (talk) 15:37, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Event-free survival (EFS)
There's currently no Wikipedia entry for Event-Free Survival, nor is it disambiguated on the EFS disambiguation page. It is unclear whether EFS warrants an article in its own right or whether it would make more sense to add it to this page in the context of comparing and contrasting cancer survivability metrics, however, cancer research literature is very heavily laden with jargon like PFS and EFS making comprehension challenging to the lay-person. It appears that there is a lack of a commonly understood definition even within the medical research community.