RE:RE:ASCO I have been trying to find more information on this but I do know that not all patients in a trial need to expire to calculate overall survival.
I am not sure of the formula but do know that there is supposedly a cutoff that calculates it and once that point is reached that os can be calculated.
I do believe that onc is also calculatiing evolving os for the bracelet trial if I heard that correctly but am not positive on this point.
From some research I did.
No, not all patients in a clinical trial have to die to calculate overall survival (OS). In fact, OS can be calculated even if some patients are still alive at the end of the study.
OS is calculated as the length of time from randomization (or treatment initiation) until death from any cause. Therefore, the OS analysis includes all patients who were enrolled in the study, regardless of whether they died or not. For patients who are still alive at the end of the study, their survival time is censored, meaning that their survival time is known only up until the time of the last follow-up.
Censoring is a common feature of survival analysis, which allows researchers to estimate survival rates even when some patients are lost to follow-up or still alive at the end of the study. Censored data are taken into account when calculating the survival curves and the hazard ratio (HR), which is a measure of the relative risk of death between the treatment and control groups.
In summary, OS can be calculated in a clinical trial even if some patients are still alive at the end of the study, as long as the survival time for each patient is recorded and censored data are taken into account in the analysis.