statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

, median follow-up is the

median The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a Sample (statistics), data sample, a statistical population, population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “ ...

time between a specified event and the time when data on outcomes are gathered. The concept is used in cancer survival analyses. Many cancer studies aim to assess the time between two events of interest, such as from treatment to remission, treatment to

relapse In internal medicine, relapse or recidivism is a recurrence of a past (typically medical) condition. For example, multiple sclerosis and malaria often exhibit peaks of activity and sometimes very long periods of dormancy, followed by relapse or r ...

, or

diagnosis Diagnosis (: diagnoses) is the identification of the nature and cause of a certain phenomenon. Diagnosis is used in a lot of different academic discipline, disciplines, with variations in the use of logic, analytics, and experience, to determine " ...

to death. This duration is generically called survival time, even if the end point is not death. Time-to-event studies must have sufficiently long follow-up durations to capture enough events to reveal meaningful patterns in the data. A short follow-up duration is appropriate for studying very severe cancers with poor prognoses, whereas a long follow-up duration is better suited to studying less-severe disease, or participants with good prognoses.Clark, M. J. Bradburn, S. B. Love and D. G. Altman (15 July 2003). "Survival Analysis Part I: Basic concepts and first analyses". British Journal of Cancer. . Median follow-up time is included in about half the survival analyses published in cancer journals, but of those, only 31% specify the method used to compute it.Schemper and Terry L. Smith (1996). "A Note on Quantifying Follow-up in Studies of Failure Time". Elsevier (Department of Medical Computer Sciences, Vienna University, Austria).

References

Biostatistics {{statistics-stub