What does pfs medicine mean?

PFS (progression-free survival) refers to the time from the beginning of treatment to the observation of disease progression or death from any cause.

PFS is an index to judge the clinical efficacy of some breast and cervical cancers. The reason is that the ultimate goal of anti-tumor therapy is to prolong the life of patients, but for some breast cancer and cervical cancer, the survival time of patients can be very long. Choosing OS as the main end point index to study the efficacy of anti-tumor drugs will greatly prolong the duration of the experiment, increase the difficulty of the experiment and the interference of uncontrollable factors, thus making the experimental results unreliable.

In view of this situation, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows some tumor drug trials to use PFS as an alternative indicator of OS to judge clinical efficacy.

Extended data:

Advantages of PFS as an endpoint

As an alternative destination, gas stations have the following advantages:

1. Compared with using OS as the end point, it requires shorter test time, lower operation difficulty and smaller sample size.

2, not affected by cross-treatment and follow-up treatment.

3. Compared with the time of progress (TTP), the end point includes death, which has a better correlation with OS.

Disadvantages of PFS as an end point

Disadvantages mainly include the following points:

1. For many tumor diseases, there is not enough evidence to explain the correlation between PFS and OS, that is, it is not an effective substitute index for OS in all cases.

2. In the open test, the deviation of evaluation is easy to appear, which belongs to the inaccurate measurement index. In controlled trials, follow-up and imaging evaluation must be balanced. 3. Frequent imaging evaluation is required.

Common deletion and time definition of PFS

Starting point: Start treatment time. End point: disease progression or death. Censored: Patients without disease progression and death usually take the date of the last imaging examination as the end point and regard it as censored value.

Baidu Encyclopedia-No Progress Survival Time