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Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on January 8, 2008
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2008 100(2):80-81; doi:10.1093/jnci/djm304
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press.

EDITORIALS

Times to Event: Why Are They Hard to Visualize?

Janet Wittes

Affiliation of author: Statistics Collaborative, Inc, Washington, DC

Correspondence to: Janet Wittes, PhD, Statistics Collaborative, Inc, 1625 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Ste 600, Washington, DC 20036 (e-mail: janet@statcollab.com).

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

One would think that nearly 350 years of experience with survival curves (1) and 60 years of looking at Kaplan-Meier curves (2) would have trained our brain to interpret correctly what our eyes are seeing. But, to mix metaphors, our brains and our eyes march to different drummers. Our brains understand that the height of the riser in a single step of a Kaplan-Meier curve is inversely related to the sample size—the smaller the number of people eligible to experience an event (ie, make the step), the larger the drop when an event occurs. When two time-to-event curves from a study of, say, 5 years hover together for the first 2 years and then separate, . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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