R: Chemotherapy for Stage B/C colon cancer

colon {survival} | R Documentation

## Chemotherapy for Stage B/C colon cancer

### Description

These are data from one of the first successful trials of adjuvant chemotherapy for colon cancer. Levamisole is a low-toxicity compound previously used to treat worm infestations in animals; 5-FU is a moderately toxic (as these things go) chemotherapy agent. There are two records per person, one for recurrence and one for death

### Usage

    colon

### Format

id: | id
study: | 1 for all patients
rx: | Treatment - Obs(ervation), Lev(amisole), Lev(amisole)+5-FU
sex: | 1=male
age: | in years
obstruct: | obstruction of colon by tumour
perfor: | perforation of colon
adhere: | adherence to nearby organs
nodes: | number of lymph nodes with detectable cancer
time: | days until event or censoring
status: | censoring status
differ: | differentiation of tumour (1=well, 2=moderate, 3=poor)
extent: | Extent of local spread (1=submucosa, 2=muscle, 3=serosa, 4=contiguous structures)
surg: | time from surgery to registration (0=short, 1=long)
node4: | more than 4 positive lymph nodes
etype: | event type: 1=recurrence,2=death

### Note

The study is originally described in Laurie (1989). The main report is found in Moertel (1990). This data set is closest to that of the final report in Moertel (1991). A version of the data with less follow-up time was used in the paper by Lin (1994).

Peter Higgins has pointed out a data inconsistency, revealed by `table(colon$nodes, colon$node4)`. We don't know which of the two variables is actually correct so have elected not to 'fix' it. (Real data has warts, why not have some in the example data too?)

### References

JA Laurie, CG Moertel, TR Fleming, HS Wieand, JE Leigh, J Rubin, GW McCormack, JB Gerstner, JE Krook and J Malliard. Surgical adjuvant therapy of large-bowel carcinoma: An evaluation of levamisole and the combination of levamisole and fluorouracil: The North Central Cancer Treatment Group and the Mayo Clinic. J Clinical Oncology, 7:1447-1456, 1989.

DY Lin. Cox regression analysis of multivariate failure time data: the marginal approach. Statistics in Medicine, 13:2233-2247, 1994.

CG Moertel, TR Fleming, JS MacDonald, DG Haller, JA Laurie, PJ Goodman, JS Ungerleider, WA Emerson, DC Tormey, JH Glick, MH Veeder and JA Maillard. Levamisole and fluorouracil for adjuvant therapy of resected colon carcinoma. New England J of Medicine, 332:352-358, 1990.

CG Moertel, TR Fleming, JS MacDonald, DG Haller, JA Laurie, CM Tangen, JS Ungerleider, WA Emerson, DC Tormey, JH Glick, MH Veeder and JA Maillard, Fluorouracil plus Levamisole as an effective adjuvant therapy after resection of stage II colon carcinoma: a final report. Annals of Internal Med, 122:321-326, 1991.

[Package survival version 3.2-7 Index]