Assessing clinical efficacy of drugs in cancer patients: are we on the right track?

摘要

The history of the relationship between medicine and statistics in cancer treatment looks like a lucky and happy marriage with some inevitable crises. The happy side of the marriage is that application of statistics and methodology to clinical trials allowed the evolution from anecdotal and narrative to evidence-based medicine. However, more recently, some concerns have arisen about credibility and meaning-fulness of the trial findings for actually improving the treatment of cancer patients in standard clinical practice [1-4].