The survival curve, which is the basic tool of what essentially we’re going to get to in the Cox proportional hazards model, is a graph of the percentage of people who survive longer than each period of time. So it starts at 100% at the time you start this thing everybody is surviving. And then it’s the probability of surviving more than one day, one week, one month, one year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, et cetera.
In randomized clinical trials, for example, we’re comparing a treatment versus some sort of control or comparison. Time to remission is a great outcome measure. Or time to recovery, if there is such a thing as recovery in many of these illnesses, is a wonderful outcome measure, specifically because it is so important to the patients. You know we could talk about reduction of symptoms, we could talk about a lot of other outcome measures. But what the patient is really interested in is, “Am I going to get well?”
To learn more from Dr. Helena Kraemer listen to the podcast episode below.
