Description:

Lucia Petito, PhD

Assistant Professor (Biostatistics)
Department of Preventive Medicine
Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine

Presentation Title
Emulating randomized trials in elderly individuals with cancer:
a case study using SEER-Medicare

Objectives

Researchers are often interested in evaluating the comparative effectiveness of cancer therapies. Most commonly, these questions are addressed by conducting randomized trials, where the treatment assignment is randomized. However, large randomized trials can be prohibitively expensive or logistically infeasible, so researchers have turned to observational data sources to generate evidence to answer these questions. Unfortunately, naïve analyses of observational data easily lend themselves to misleading and biased results. Here, we will discuss best practices when applying the target trial framework developed by Hernán & Robins (2016) in the SEER-Medicare linked database to emulate randomized trials. We will consider the emulation of a particular trial: adjuvant chemotherapy versus observation after tumor resection in individuals with stage II colorectal cancer.