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Daniel M. Lane, MD, PhD
Langston Medical Clinic, Inc Oklahoma City

JAMA. 1985;253(16):2364.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The article by Oye and Shapiro¹ on the evaluation of cancer chemotherapy trials reflects the usual short-sighted view of retrospective statistical analyses evaluating earlier studies for response and survival. The main defect is that the authors attempt to take other people's data as published and evaluate those data without having made the observations themselves. Just as many errors in regard to the evaluation of cancer chemotherapy trials result from this approach as do the techniques criticized by the authors. Those errors in evaluation are the product of several factors, including the following.

1. Using survival as the only end point of response to therapy denies the importance of life quality despite the authors' comment that adequate criteria for evaluating quality of life do not exist. Problems of evaluating objective vs subjective responses are part of clinical research trials no matter what area is studied. This dilemma is . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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