Authors’ reply to Oke and Welch

We thank Oke and Welch for their response.1The aim of our study2 is to provide information to help clinicians estimate the breast cancer mortality risk for individual patients presenting at a clinic today. Patients have identified that this information is needed to inform current and future patients about their prognosis.3 We derived these risk estimates by first calculating annual breast cancer mortality (reported in percentages: 100 × number of deaths ÷ number of person years at risk) according to all the following factors simultaneously: time since diagnosis, age at diagnosis, whether the cancer was detected by screening, the number of involved lymph nodes, tumour size, grade, oestrogen receptor status, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 status.The case fatality rate, which is the proportion of people with a condition who die from that condition,4 can be a useful measure of disease severity in some circumstances. It would not, however, have…
Read Original Article: Authors’ reply to Oke and Welch »