Briana Williams, a molecular biologist at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, and her colleagues decided to look for biological differences in 100 prostate tumors, matched for disease stage and other clinical factors.
A placebo or non-treated group in this population was not feasible, therefore a comparable non-treatment group of twelve community dwelling eugonadal men without prostate cancer range matched for age within four years and education within two years underwent the same neuroimaging procedures at a matching time interval to the ADT group.
The two study groups (BPH and prostate cancer) were well matched for age and race.
Such matching automatically matches for calendar time, as prostate check clinics were completed sequentially.
We estimated the probability of an individual patient lacking a diagnosis in SEER due to an imperfect linkage between Medicare and SEER by applying known SEER to Medicare match rates for prostate cancer (available from the National Cancer Institute) stratified by age, race and SEER region.
To better control for individual and tissue-specific expression differences, we tested our hypothesis using a RNA-seq tumor dataset that contains data for matched prostate tumor and normal tissue from 14 patients with different grades of prostate cancer [ 21].
To increase statistical power, controls initially selected for other end points also were included in the present analysis, allowing for up to 6 matched controls for some prostate cancer cases.
Of the 14 enrolled studies, all but 4 were matched by age; 6 were sex-matched, 1 did not mention the sex-matching, and 7 that examined either breast, cervical, or prostate cancer did not need to match for sex.
Initially, at least 1 control was matched to each prostate cancer case.
12 A larger Australian longitudinal study with a 3-year follow-up compared men treated for prostate cancer with matched controls to account for potential effects of normal ageing.
