4 thoughts on “Harrison Cash, MD, MS”

  1. Hi Harrison.

    Cool project!

    For datablast talk, pare down to key points because you have 5 slides: 1 title slide, 1 background/into, 1 methods, 1 results, 1 discussion/conclusion.

    Presentation Feedback:
    – Your table of results (mean time to death) for the “without surgery” group is mis-labeled as “with surgery.”
    – Units of mean time to death no specified (days, weeks, months?).

    Science feedback:
    – Why not adjust for race when it was different between groups?
    – It is surprising how much worse the non-surgery groups did compared to surgery groups (not your primary aim, but it jumps out), and especially because the non-surgery group had less advanced cancer stage on average. A comment on this would be of interest (eg, surgery is way better than primary photon or neutron therapy?).

  2. Thanks for the comments, Dr. Weaver. I have very much paired down the data to only what is relevant for the presentation.

    The poster feedback is appreciated. I was adapting these figures from my paper submission and these were areas that were adapted incorrectly during the transition. The difference in survival times is months.

    Regarding the science feedback, race was not adjusted for between groups as we did not predict this to correlate with disease outcome. However, the point is well received and perhaps we should have done this given disparate outcomes due to access to care. The difference between primary surgery and primary radiation groups lies in that salivary gland cancer is primarily a surgical disease unless considered unresectable. Radiation as primary treatment is typically reserved for those whose disease is not amenable to surgical resection or due to patient-specific factors. I lay this out better in the paper and presentation, but we therefore considered patients who received primary radiation as “unresectable” and define it as such. In this context, it is not very surprising to observe these differences in survival.

  3. Interest that unresectable had lower average tumor and TNM stage, opposite of expected for unresectable.

  4. Great insights, Dr. Weaver. Looking at the data, it appears I incorrectly used pathologic T stage to categorize primary RT patients which is not applicable. Clinical T stage shows ~60% of patient receiving primary RT to be T3/4 disease.

    I will be updating my tables!

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