Relative Survival: A Useful Tool in Population Based Health Studies

摘要

Conventionally, net or crude survival was employed to study and predict patient’s clinical disease progression after diagnosis. Relative survival, the survival analogue of excess mortality, is becoming the method of choice for estimating patient survival using data collected from population-based registries in cancer, HIV etc. Relative Survival is the ratio of the overall survival of a cohort or a group of patients to the expected survival for a demographically similar group. It is commonly used in disease registries to estimate the effect of a particular disease when the true cause of death is not reliably known. This article attempts to describe the methods for estimation of relative survival and modelling excess hazard.