Be afraid
From the Herald (from the Daily Mail)
Patients should be warned about the dangers of chemotherapy after research showed that cancer drugs are killing up to 50 per cent of patients in some UK hospitals.
That’s almost completely untrue.
Firstly, the research looked at deaths from any cause within 30 days of starting treatment, and did not claim these were all due to chemotherapy. Secondly, the 50% figure was in one hospital. Thirdly, it was for a subset of one particular type of cancer. And, the conclusion from the news story cannot be found anywhere in the research paper.
The researchers do think that chemotherapy is probably being used suboptimally in some of the hospitals, including the one where about 5 out of 10 of the patients being treated ‘with curative intent’ for lung cancer died within 30 days. That hospital stood out, despite the tiny numbers, because the average death rate across all hospitals for similar patients was about 3%.
As the researchers say
The identification of hospitals with significantly higher 30-day mortality rates will promote review of clinical decision making in these hospitals.
It probably will, but that doesn’t tell us much about risks here on the other side of the world
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »