| lung {survival} | R Documentation |
Survival in patients with advanced lung cancer from the North Central Cancer Treatment Group. Performance scores rate how well the patient can perform usual daily activities.
lung cancer
| inst: | Institution code |
| time: | Survival time in days |
| status: | censoring status 1=censored, 2=dead |
| age: | Age in years |
| sex: | Male=1 Female=2 |
| ph.ecog: | ECOG performance score (0=good 5=dead) |
| ph.karno: | Karnofsky performance score (bad=0-good=100) rated by physician |
| pat.karno: | Karnofsky performance score as rated by patient |
| meal.cal: | Calories consumed at meals |
| wt.loss: | Weight loss in last six months |
The use of 1/2 for alive/dead instead of the usual 0/1 is a historical footnote. For data contained on punch cards, IBM 360 Fortran treated blank as a zero, which led to a policy within the section of Biostatistics to never use "0" as a data value since one could not distinguish it from a missing value. The policy became a habit, as is often the case; and the 1/2 coding endured long beyond the demise of punch cards and Fortran.
Terry Therneau
Loprinzi CL. Laurie JA. Wieand HS. Krook JE. Novotny PJ. Kugler JW. Bartel J. Law M. Bateman M. Klatt NE. et al. Prospective evaluation of prognostic variables from patient-completed questionnaires. North Central Cancer Treatment Group. Journal of Clinical Oncology. 12(3):601-7, 1994.