HLTH 7025 Healthcare Data for Decision-Making, Spring 2022
Assignment 3 (Due Monday, November 7, 2022)
Please answer all 2 questions. Record your answers in the template document provided and submit them via Turnitin before 11:59 pm on the due date. The marks allocated to each question are shown in the assignment. A total of 40 marks are available, and this assignment is worth 40% of your overall grade.
Copying answers from other students, sharing answers with other students, and writing answers in a group are all forms of cheating. Any student doing any of these will be reported for academic misconduct.
Question 1 [15 marks]
From a cross-sectional life table of age-specific death rates provided, please answer the following questions below:
Age group Interval Death Population Death rate nQx lx ndx Lx Tx ex
0-4 24 14524 1000
5-9 1 17816
10-14 3 24172
15-19 15 20848
20-24 20 10884
25-29 11 7212
30-34 11 9136
35-39 8 12868
40-44 20 14132
45-49 22 10128
50-54 30 6784
55-59 37 5740
60-64 57 4048
65-69 65 2772
70-74 107 2100
75-79 74 1136
80-84 69 440
85-89 41 168
90+ 17 44 1
(a) Calculate the following column heading: interval, Death rate, nQx, lx, ndx ,Lx ,Tx and ex [12 marks]
(b) To what age would you expect a person to live (on average) once he/she attained the age of 15 years? [3 marks]
Question 2 [25 marks]:
A large hospital in Nepal followed up with men with prostate cancer for 15 years. The data is summarised in two tables below, differentiating patients according to treatment status (With and without chemotherapy) and providing the necessary information to calculate the cumulative survival probabilities.
Table 1: Patents with chemotherapy
Years Number at Risk Death Cumulative Survival probability
1 21 0
2 0
3 0
4 0
5 1
6 1
7 1
8 0
9 0
10 0
11 0
12 1
13 1
14 0
15 0
Table 2: Patents without chemotherapy
Years Number at Risk Death Cumulative Survival probability
1 28 1
2 2
3 1
4 1
5 0
6 0
7 0
8 1
9 1
10 2
11 1
12 2
13 0
14 1
15 1
• Calculate the cumulative survival probabilities for the two treatment groups [9 marks]
• Draw a graph showing both cumulative survival probabilities? [2 marks]
• Investigate the two survival probabilities curves carefully. For survival benefits, suggest whether it would be beneficial for a patient to accept chemotherapy or not. and why? [2 marks]
• Compare the two groups of patients by means of a log-rank test (a=0.05; two-sided) [12 marks]