How do you explain progression free survival to patients?

This is a really, really important question.

I'd argue we often greatly undervalue the importance of communication with our patients and the impact the quality of our communication has on what they understand about their illness.

I remember once having a long conversation with a patient where I outlined multiple facets of a complex new cancer diagnosis: I waxed on and on about survival curves, chemotherapy regimens, randomized controlled trials, etc. At the end of my lecture, the patient let a p...

I think we do patients a disservice a lot of the time by using PFS and equating that with OS or even with clinical benefit. PFS can simply mean that a target lesion on an imaging study has not increased by more than 20%, and that does not necessarily correlate with any benefit at all.

I first like to talk about treatable versus curable. This is similar to/the same as palliative versus curable. However, assessing a person's understanding of the disease is helpful before starting the conversation. This often takes 5-10 minutes but allows for some very important questions -- often times ones that may not have been addressed previously -- and frames the important conversation to follow.

For progression free survival, discussion of treatments and their goals, in general, should b...

From a Radiation Oncology perspective in the curative setting, I frequently use the terms remission even when talking about solid tumors, saying that if you've been in remission for 5 to 10 years (disease site specific) you achieve a cure.

I cannot remember a situation where a patient has explicitly asked me about progression-free survival, but I would explain it as the likelihood that you are alive and that the cancer has not returned at a certain time-point, or an average (median) time-point f...

Statistical calculations are almost always confusing and at times could be biased due to the sample size/characteristics. Most of the data are based on western literature and has different populations. To generalize a different group of patients may not be accurate. I refer to "When breath becomes air", written by Paul Kalanithi. He wanted to know statistics of metastatic lung cancer but his oncologist strategically avoided that detailed discussion. It could be general but I agree that each pati...