Assessing real-world representativeness of prospective registry cohorts in oncology: insights from patients with esophagogastric cancer

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to explore the real-world representativeness of a prospective registry cohort with active accrual in oncology, applying a representativeness metric that is novel to health care.

STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING: We used data from the Prospective Observational Cohort Study of Esophageal-Gastric Cancer Patients (POCOP) registry and from the population-based Netherlands Cancer Registry (NCR). We used Representativeness-indicators (R-indicators) and overall survival to investigate the degree to which the POCOP cohort and clinically relevant subgroups were a representative sample compared to the NCR database. Calibration using inverse propensity score weighting was applied to correct differences between POCOP and NCR.

RESULTS: The R-indicator of the entire POCOP registry was 0.72 95% confidence interval [0.71, 0.73]. Representativeness of palliative patients was higher than that of potentially curable patients (R-indicator 0.88 [0.85, 0.90] and 0.70 [0.68, 0.71], respectively). Stratification to clinically relevant subgroups based on treatment resulted in higher R-indicators of the respective subgroups. Both after stratification and calibration weighting survival estimates in the POCOP registry were more similar to that in the NCR population.

CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated the assessment of real-world representativeness of patients who participated in a prospective registry cohort and showed that real-world representativeness improved when the variability in treatment was accounted for.