These are data from one of the first successful trials of adjuvant chemotherapy for colon cancer. Levamisole is a low-toxicity compound previously used to treat worm infestations in animals; 5-FU is a moderately toxic (as these things go) chemotherapy agent.
A data frame with 929 observations on the following 15 variables. Below a brief description is given for some of these variables.
Time to recurrence/censoring/death, whichever occurs first.
Recurrence/censoring indicator (recurrence=1, alive=0).
Time to censoring/death, whichever occurs first.
Death/censoring indicator (death=1, alive=0).
Treatment - Obs(ervation), Lev(amisole), Lev(amisole)+5-FU.
Sex indicator (male=1, female=0).
Age in years.
Obstruction of colon by tumour.
Perforation of colon.
Adherence to nearby organs.
Number of lymph nodes with detectable cancer.
Differentiation of tumour (1=well, 2=moderate, 3=poor).
Extent of local spread (1=submucosa, 2=muscle, 3=serosa, 4=contiguous structures).
Time from surgery to registration (0=short, 1=long).
More than 4 positive lymph nodes.
JA Laurie, CG Moertel, TR Fleming, HS Wieand, JE Leigh, J Rubin, GW McCormack, JB Gerstner, JE Krook and J Malliard. Surgical adjuvant therapy of large-bowel carcinoma: An evaluation of levamisole and the combination of levamisole and fluorouracil: The North Central Cancer Treatment Group and the Mayo Clinic. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 7:1447-1456, 1989.
DY Lin. Cox regression analysis of multivariate failure time data: the marginal approach. Statistics in Medicine, 13:2233-2247, 1994.
CG Moertel, TR Fleming, JS MacDonald, DG Haller, JA Laurie, PJ Goodman, JS Ungerleider, WA Emerson, DC Tormey, JH Glick, MH Veeder and JA Maillard. Levamisole and fluorouracil for adjuvant therapy of resected colon carcinoma. New England Journal of Medicine, 332:352-358, 1990.
CG Moertel, TR Fleming, JS MacDonald, DG Haller, JA Laurie, CM Tangen, JS Ungerleider, WA Emerson, DC Tormey, JH Glick, MH Veeder and JA Maillard. Fluorouracil plus Levamisole as and effective adjuvant therapy after resection of stage II colon carcinoma: a final report. Annals of Internal Medicine, 122:321-326, 1991.