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Rebuttal to editorial saying cancer survival statistics are misleading

BMJ 2011; 343 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.d4214 (Published 05 July 2011) Cite this as: BMJ 2011;343:d4214

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Scientific Censorship?

I do not profess to understand the intricacies of the statistical
methodology discussed in this article. But the call by the authors for the
withdrawal of Beral & Peto's 2010 editorial sounds like scientific
censorship.

I hope the group of highly eminent authors are not advocating
scientific censorship.

I hope they do support the British Medical Association (BMA) members
who voted for libel reform. http://www.libelreform.org/

Irrespective of the merits of one argument, it should be up to the
readers and peers to make their own judgements.

Disapproval of a scientific hypothesis does not mean that the said
hypothesis should be extinguished from scientific literature.

Competing interests: 1. Scepticism about comparison of national survival statistics born out of experience with prostate cancer statistics which is highly susceptible to various biases.http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/types/prostate/survival/

03 August 2011
S Sundar
Consultant Oncologist
Nottingham University Hospital NHS trust

Authors' emphasis lost in online version of letter

Professor Coleman and colleagues' italic emphasis on the words "If", "may be", "would", and "makes" in the quotation from Beral and Peto's original editorial[1] has been lost in the online version of their letter.

The correct version is:

If the first months or years of the illness are never traced, the earliest event registered may be some aspect of cancer recurrence. The date of this recurrence would then be taken as the date from which 'survival rates' are calculated. This makes short term survival look misleadingly worse in the UK than in countries such as Sweden .... [our italics](1)

The print version is correct, as is the original response (in which the words were emphasised in bold italics).[2]

1 Beral V, Peto R. UK cancer survival statistics. BMJ 2010;341:c4112

2 Coleman M, et al. Rapid response "UK cancer survival statistics are misleading and make survival look worse than it is": rebuttal. bmj.com 2011. http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c4112/reply#bmj_el_261899

Competing interests: No competing interests

12 July 2011
Sharon Davies
letters editor
BMJ
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