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From what I have been reading, in most cases, recurrence-free survival (RFS) is defined as the time from date of randomisation to the date of recurrence of disease (e.g. tumour growth), or death due to any cause.

What about the percentage of participants with RFS?

I have seen clinical trials with primary outcome measures like: 'Percentage of Participants With Recurrence-Free Survival (RFS) At X Months Among All Participants'; let's say that from the result they got a percentage of 80% for Group A and 50% for Group B, what does this '80%' and '50%' exactly mean?

Here is my guess: the higher the percentage of RFS among participants in [a certain time frame], the higher number of participants have not experienced any disease progression / death. Therefore higher % of RFS, the more effective the treatment is. (As for my previous example, Group A would be more effective than Group B).

p.s. I'm a high school student, apologies if I have missed certain information or have misused some medical terms. I would appreciate it if someone can clarify this for me. Thanks :)

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Short answer: Yes, your guess is right. Cancer treatment has the problem that it has to catch all malignant cells. The more effective a treatment is the higher the chance for reaching this goal and the lower are the chances for disease recurrence.

I a clinical study you usually test a new treatment against the current standard (placebo treatments are not seen as ethically justifiable) to see if the new treatment is better. There are different possibilities to test the outcome, recurrence free survival (RFS) is one of them. It marks the time between the treatment until recurrence of the disease (or death occurs).

So if the new treatment has a higher percentage in the PFS for a certain timepoint than the current standard of treatment, it is better in treating the disease, if the percentage is lower, the treatment is worse.

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you so much for your answer; it really cleared my doubts :) Do you have any related sources for this question that I can read/cite? It would help me invaluably with my dissertation. $\endgroup$
    – Xiaoci W.
    Commented Aug 12 at 3:14

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