Furthermore, landmark studies such as the Lipid Research Clinics Coronary Primary Prevention Trial (LRC-CPPT) and the Scandanavian Simvastatin Survival Study (4S) showed that lowering LDL cholesterol has the direct result of reducing cardiovascular (CV) deaths.
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The Atlas (Assessment of Treatment with Lisinopril and Survival) study found the drug is much more effective if the dose is increased.
Two conventional on-going ALS studies are designed to see if lithium has a very small effect on survival, something the PatientsLikeMe study wouldn't be able to pick up.
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The study showed comparable overall survival rates between patients treated with the NovoTTF-100A System and those who underwent chemotherapy.
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One problem: The Erbitux trial lacks a control group or a comparison to conventional chemotherapy, so the study does not show clear survival benefit.
Simdax, a heart failure drug from Abbott Laboratories and Orion Pharmaceutical, failed to prove it extended survival compared to an older treatment in a study of 1, 327 patients.
The study also found that international differences in survival were also wider for older women.
The Concord study published in 2008 showed that cancer survival rates in Britain are among the worst in Europe.
But the second, a 127-patient study, showed that the drug extended survival.
In one study the cooling increased the rate of survival with minimal or moderate disability from 26% to 49%, according to results published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Dr. Perez and other experts noted that neither study has yet shown an improvement in overall survival.
While the results of the breast cancer study backed the idea that exercise can improve survival rates or reduce tumour size, more research was needed in this area, she said.
The study was designed to measure progression-free survival, which is a measurement of the time from the start of treatment until the disease gets worse or the patient dies, and overall survival, which is a measurement of time from the start of treatment until death.
The analysis of overall survival (OS), a key secondary endpoint of the study, is event driven.
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Peto points out that hundreds of drugs are being studied in thousands of clinical trials, and sometimes a study will show a drug causes cancer or extends survival just by chance.
However, the study could not yet confirm if the vaccine could improve survival chances, only that the patient's defence systems were activated.
The findings echo early results from the decade-long Epicure 2 study, published last month, which also showed improved survival rates for babies born at 24 and 25 weeks, but not for those born earlier.
In a recent study, IMC-C225 demonstrated a 22.5% survival improvement in colorectal cancer patients.
More troubling, independent experts said, is that patients who were expected to do the best based on genetic and other tests surprisingly had a worse survival trend 16 months versus 25 months for others in the study.
To complicate matters, Genentech did do such a study for its cancer treatment Avastin--and the drug extended survival, making it the standard of care for colorectal cancer patients whose cancer has started to spread.
"It's very unfortunate that they did not go forward with the planned front-line study in 2001 and 2002, because that would have given us survival data, " says Leonard Saltz of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Celldex CEO Anthony Marucci has said previously that a meaningful and positive response rate in the study would be 12% to 15% with a progression-free survival of greater than 12 weeks.
Writing in the BMJ, Professor Neena Modi from Imperial College London said the study was important because it provided the most up-to-date information on survival rates.
Data shows that for cancer survival, the UK ranks behind many countries, including the five other nations looked at in the study.
"It looks like it is a useful regimen and looks like it will have powerful impacts on survival, " said Georgetown's Dr. Weiner, who wasn't involved with the study.
This suggests that lower overall breast cancer survival in the UK is not because women are being diagnosed at a later stage than in other countries, the study says.
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