Causal effects of chemotherapy regimen intensity on survival outcome through Marginal Structural Models


As patients develop toxic side-effects, cancer treatment is adapted over time by either delaying or reducing the dosage of the next chemotherapy course. In this talk Marginal Structural Models in combination with InverseProbability-of-Treatment Weighted estimators to assess the causal effects of chemotherapy regimen modifications on survival outcome will be discussed. The focus is on the use of actual treatment data and Received Dose Intensity in contrast with the use of intended treatment regimen. The latter approach, known as Intention to treat, is very common but also very far from the everyday clinical practice. In this talk, I will discuss the confounding nature of toxic side-effects data and shows the damaging effect of not including toxicity in the analysis. The method developed is applied to the osteosarcoma randomised clinical trials BO03 and BO06 (EORTC 80861 and 80931).

4 Novembre 2022

Marta Fiocco
University of Leiden


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