Clinical Trials and Clinical Significance of Life Endpoints in Oncology

Jeff A. Sloan, Ph.D.
Mayo Clinic Rochester

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
3:30pm
Moos 2-690
Minneapolis Campus

Abstract:

This presentation will review issues, challenges, and solutions regarding doing clinical trials in quality of life (QOL) research. A number of example clinical trials will be presented in order to discuss issues surrounding measurement issues, analytical techniques, and approaches to interpretation and communication of results relating to QOL endpoints. The examples are drawn from North Central Cancer Treatment Group treatment and cancer control clinical trials.

Recent advances with respect to the assessment of clinical significance for symptoms and other patient-reported outcomes will be described. The need for the identification of clinical meaningfulness in studies of symptom assessment and QOL research will be presented along with solutions applied to date. Two series of manuscripts that have been compiled by experts in QOL will be discussed. The evolution of the ½ standard deviation guideline for definition of a clinically meaningful effect size will be highlighted.

A social tea will be held at 3:00 P.M. in A434 Mayo. All are Welcome.
For more details contact 612-624-4655 or see http://www.biostat.umn.edu/seminar_academic.html