Jon Steingrimsson

PhD

Brown University

Assistent Professor

PLCO (Learn more about this study)

PLCO-707

Dec 31, 2020

Generalizing the effect of chest x-ray screening

Deciding which intervention to implement requires accurate information about how patients in the intended population will respond to the interventions under consideration. Clinical trials are almost always conducted with a specific target population in mind, but data collected is rarely a random sample of that population for various reasons, including the difference between participants who agree to participate in a clinical trial and those who refuse, or the clinical setting or geographic location of the clinical trial. To address this important limitation, we have developed several methods that accurately transport or generalize trial results from one or more clinical trials to the target population of interest.

This project aims to illustrate and evaluate the performance of the different methods we have developed. We will use data from the chest X-ray arms of the PLCO lung trial and the National Lung Screening Trial. We will transport the results such that they can be interpreted in the context of the population underlying the NHANES database (which is thought to be reasonable representative of the US population). Combining information from multiple clinical trials improves efficiency compared to using just a single trial. The outcome used will be diagnosis of lung cancer during 5 years from the baseline screen. Using these data sets will estimate the proportion of people that will be diagnosed with lung cancer during a 5-year period if all people in the target population (defined using the NHANES data) received chest X-ray.