Multidisciplinary tumor boards and their analyses: the yin and yang of outcome measures.
BMC Cancer
; 21(1): 173, 2021 Feb 17.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33596881
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND:
The standard to ensure utmost cancer treatment is a prerequisite in national cancer plans for comprehensive cancer centers (CCCs) and ensured through multidisciplinary tumor boards (MTBs). Despite these being compulsory for CCCs, various analyses on MTBs have been performed, since MTBs are resource-intensive. Outcome measures in these prior analyses had been survival (OS), MTB-adherence and -satisfaction, inclusion of patients into clinical trials and better cancer care. MAIN BODY A publication from Freytag et al. performed an analysis in multiple tumor entities and assessed the effect of number of MTBs. By matched-pair analysis, they compared response and OS of patients, whose cases were discussed in MTBs vs. those that were not. The analysis included 454 patients and 66 different tumor types. Only patients with > 3 MTBs showed a significantly better OS than patients with no MTB meeting. Response to treatment, relapse free survival and time to progression were not found to be better, nor was there any difference for a specific tumor entity with vs. without MTB discussions. An in-depth discussion of these results, with respect to the literature (PubMed search "MTBs AND cancer") and within the author group, including statisticians specialized in data analysis of cancer patients and questions addressed in MTBs, was performed to interpret these findings. We conclude that the results by Freytag et al. are deceiving due to an "immortal time bias" that requires more careful data interpretation.CONCLUSIONS:
The result of Freytag et al. of a seemingly positive impact of higher number of MTBs needs to be interpreted cautiously their presumed better OS in patients with > 3 MTB discussions is misleading, due to an immortal time bias. Here patients need to survive long enough to be discussed more often. Therefore, these results should not lead to the conclusion that more MTBs will "automatically" increase cancer patients' OS, rather than that the insightful discussion, at best in MTBs and with statisticians, will generate meaningful advice, that is important for cancer patients.Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Equipe de Assistência ao Paciente
/
Avaliação de Resultados em Cuidados de Saúde
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Guias de Prática Clínica como Assunto
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Comunicação Interdisciplinar
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Neoplasias
Tipo de estudo:
Guideline
/
Qualitative_research
Limite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2021
Tipo de documento:
Article