Discordance in Estrogen Receptor Status Between Two Primary Breast Cancers: Impact of Misclassification

• Activity Number: 115
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Juxin Liu*+ and Paul Gustafson and Dezheng Huo
• Companies: University of Saskatchewan and University of British Columbia and The University of Chicago
• Keywords: misclassification ; Bayesian ; sensitivity ; specificity ; logistic regression model

Abstract

The assessment of estrogen receptors (ER) is important for deciding hormonal therapy for breast cancer (BC) patients. The discordance of ER status may represent genuine change in the biology of the disease. It may also be due to misclassification when assessing ER status (e.g. tumor heterogeneity and limited accuracy and reproducibility of receptor assays). We proposed a Bayesian method to assess the impact of misclassification on discordance in ER status of two primary cancers. The priors for sensitivity (SN) and specificity (SP) are constructed on the ground of the measurement procedure for ER status.