Invited commentary

Our plain-English summary of Invited commentary, by S.C. Murthy (The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, 2014).

The study

• Author: S.C. Murthy
• Journal: The Annals of Thoracic Surgery
• Published: 2014;98(3):1024-5
• Type of article: Comment
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This is an invited commentary, not an original study; it reported no new data. The author discussed Taioli and colleagues' study in the same journal. That study used the nationwide SEER database, adjusted for age, stage and treatment, and concluded that women with mesothelioma survive far longer than men. The author raised several cautions. The data spanned about 40 years, during which staging, diagnosis and treatment changed in ways hard to adjust for. The study had to simplify stage and surgery. The author argued that this very large multicenter database must contain regional bias. Diagnosing mesothelioma correctly 20 to 40 years ago may have been difficult. Still, the author thought the study's authors were onto something real and suggested women may survive and benefit from therapy better than men. Noting that the survival curves separated within what appeared to be the first few weeks and then stayed essentially parallel out to 5 years, the author asked whether men were receiving larger and more morbid operations. The author concluded the finding was probably not a quirk in the data.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: Invited commentary (opinion piece) on another study published in the same journal issue; no original data
• Who was studied: No population of its own. The commentary discusses a study of patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma drawn from the nationwide SEER database, with data covering about 40 years
• Main results:
  • The author summarized the discussed study as concluding that women with mesothelioma survive far longer than men, after adjustment for age, stage and treatment
  • The author's view was that the study's authors were onto something real
  • The author suggested that women may survive and benefit from therapy better than men
  • Referring to the study's Figure 2, the author noted that the survival curves for women and men separated within what appeared to be the first few weeks and then stayed essentially parallel out to 5 years, and asked whether men were receiving larger and more morbid operations
• The authors' conclusion: The author concluded that the study shows women with mesothelioma outperforming men and that, given mounting evidence from other solid organ cancers, this is probably not a quirk in the data
• Limitations the authors state:
  • Limitation of the discussed study, as raised by the commentator: the data were acquired over approximately 40 years, so confounding by time (changes in staging, diagnosis, operations and care) cannot be ignored or easily adjusted for
  • Limitation of the discussed study, as raised by the commentator: critical variables such as stage and operative intervention had to be simplified
  • Limitation of the discussed study, as argued by the commentator: this very large database, with numerous centers across the country contributing, must contain regional bias
  • Limitation of the discussed study, as raised by the commentator: arriving at the correct diagnosis of mesothelioma decades ago may have been difficult

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Lung cancer, Mesothelioma.

Related studies

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• Invited commentary — R.M. Flores (2014)
• Invited commentary — B.C. Tong (2014)
• Invited commentary — J.S. Donington (2013)
• Invited commentary — L. Lang-Lazdunski (2015)
• Invited commentary — V.W. Rusch (2015)

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