Introducing longitudinal cumulative dose to describe chemotherapy patterns over time: Case study of a colon cancer trial

Adjuvant chemotherapy regimens take months to complete. Despite this, studies evaluate chemotherapy adherence via measures assessed at the end of treatment (eg, number of patients missing any dose, relative dose intensity [RDI]). This approach ignores information like the timing of treatment delays. We propose longitudinal cumulative dose (LCD) to integrate impacts of dose reductions, missed doses and dose delays over time. We obtained data from...