Prognostic program for patients with parotid carcinoma
published in Cancer 2009, the journal of the American Cancer Society
copyright 2002 by Vincent Vander Poorten MD PhD, University Hospitals Leuven
The following links will bring you to a software program. For patients, diagnosed for the first time with a malignant tumor of the parotid gland, this program can help in estimating the chance of cure following the first treatment.
Upon entering the required information about the patient and the tumor, the program will compute an estimate of prognosis both in the situation before treatment and in the situation following the surgical treatment. This estimate of prognosis is a percentage chance to stay tumor free for five years following treatment. Your doctor must assist you with the elements that need to be entered in the program, and also with the interpretation of the resulting estimated chance of being cured five years following treatment.
The elements that need to be entered were all identified using a statistical technique called Cox proportional hazards analysis.
Before treatment, it is often not sure yet whether a parotid tumor is indeed malignant.
The estimate of chance of cure in the situation before any treatment is thus a conditional estimate and has to be interpreted as follows: “If the swelling in the parotid gland this patient presents with, turns out to be malignant following surgery, there is a ….% chance of staying tumor free following completion of treatment”. (Button: “before treatment”)
Following surgery and histopathological examination of the resected parotid gland, containing the tumor, the important information resulting from this investigation will also be entered in the model and will result in a new estimate of prognosis. (Button: “after treatment”)
The program will give:
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corresponding to one of four groups of patients with differing prognosis the corresponding five year recurrence free percentage (an estimate of the chance of being cured five years following diagnosis and treatment), and its standard error (an estimate of the precision of this estimate)
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a five year recurrence free interval curve: the Y-axis displays the percentage of patients that are still tumor free at every time spot on the X-axis
- an overview of the four recurrence free interval curves , corresponding to the four patient groups one can belong to, in order to facilitate comparison to other patients.
