colonMSM {markovMSM}

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.

Usage

data("colonMSM")

Format

A data frame with 929 observations on the following 15 variables. Below a brief description is given for some of these variables.

time1

Time to recurrence/censoring/death, whichever occurs first.

event1

Recurrence/censoring indicator (recurrence=1, alive=0).

Stime

Time to censoring/death, whichever occurs first.

event

Death/censoring indicator (death=1, alive=0).

rx

Treatment - Obs(ervation), Lev(amisole), Lev(amisole)+5-FU.

sex

Sex indicator (male=1, female=0).

age

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.

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.

Source

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).

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. Journal of 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 Journal 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 and effective adjuvant therapy after resection of stage II colon carcinoma: a final report. Annals of Internal Medicine, 122:321-326, 1991.

Examples

data(colonMSM)
head(colonMSM)