Mr John Russell

Honours thesis

Survival analysis in breast cancer

From June 1987 to December 2004 I worked as a private Medical Oncologist. An Oncologist is a medical specialist who looks after patients with cancer and as a Medical Oncolgist my expertise was the use of systemic drug treatment including chemotherapy to treat patients. During that time I collected data pertaining to the patients chiefly to facilitate decision making. The data gave a succinct history of each patient's course including the primary site of the cancer, the histopathology of the cancer and what treatments were given and the outcome of those treatments. I now have a large data collection of information pertaining to various cancers particularly in relation to the treatments that they received and the outcomes of those treatments. The subject of my thesis is the analysis of this data base pertaining to 273 patients with disseminated breast cancer with particular interest in the effect of various factors affecting survival .