Projecting Event-Based Analysis Dates in Clinical Trials: An Illustration Based on the International Duration Evaluation of Adjuvant Chemotherapy (IDEA) Collaboration. Projecting Analysis Dates for the IDEA Collaboration

Abstract

Purpose: Clinical trials are expensive and lengthy, where success of a given trial depends on observing a prospectively defined number of patient events required to answer the clinical question. The point at which this analysis time occurs depends on both patient accrual and primary event rates, which typically vary throughout the trial's duration. We demonstrate real-time analysis date projections using data from a collection of six clinical trials that are part of the IDEA collaboration, an international preplanned pooling of data from six trials testing the duration of adjuvant chemotherapy in stage III colon cancer, and we additionally consider the hypothetical impact of one trial's early termination of follow-up.

Keywords

• colon cancer
• adjuvant therapy
• meta-analysis
• duration of therapy