1. Is there a way to specifically mention a "Prognosis period" for benign tumors, and Malignant tumors?
2. What is the minimal period to consider for evaluating prognosis?
3. "Good" and "Poor" are the only two scales in prognosis evaluation?
4. What are the objectives that are considered in Good and poor prognosis?
5. What are the methodologies available to evaluate the prognosis?
Please add reference link/source to your response.
Overall the bottom line is that it depends a lot on the disease.
4 & 5. Methodology First pick your outcome of interest. This may be survival, local control, time to relapse [all pretty standard outcomes of prognostic interest to patients and physicians], or something different of interest to you and your patient group. eg time to deterioration in physical function. Second use the literature or follow a large group of homogenously treated patients for the item of interest. Use standard statistical monitoring eg Cox regression, Kaplan-Meier to estimate the outcome probabilities. This is all covered in any standard biostats text.
From this you can then generalize to a similar patient population. See eg http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/25/10/2014.abstract; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2361107/
2. In terms of evaluation of prognosis period, the risk of an event will change continually with time: this conditional probability can be estimated using methods of bayesian statistics, and is to some extent covered in the references. It will very much depend on the natural history of the type of disease eg some diseases like SCC head and neck the majority will fail within 2 years, in others eg ER+ breast cancer we can see a very long continuing failure rate
3. outcome is best given as quantitative. There is no objective good and poor. A poor outcome in early breast cancer could be a spectacular outcome in early pancreas cancer.
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