Example 2

Objective

Calculate completeness indexes for all cancer sites combined, breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer to complete 40-year limited-duration prevalence at 1/1/2015. Calculate the indexes for all races combined for males and females separately. Export results to a text file.

Steps

1. Start the ComPrev application. 

2. Select File, New Session from the menu. 

3. For Type of Session, select Completeness Index Estimation. Then press the Next button at the bottom of the window. 

4. Since you are using the built in data file for ComPrev, just press the Next button on the Inc\Surv Parameters tab. 

5. On the Selection Tab, press the Unselect All Values button. Now select the following values:

   • Site: All Sites, Breast, Colon and Rectum, and Prostate.

   • Race: All Races.

   • Sex: Male, and Female. 

6. Press the Next button at the bottom of the window. 

7. On the Settings tab, set the following values:

   • Prevalence Date: 1/1/2015.

   • Initial Date of Diagnosis: 1975.

8. Once these two settings are made, the Duration will show as 40 years. As an alternative, you can set the prevalence date and duration (rather than initial date of diagnosis). Use the default settings for Age Group Output (19 Age Groups) which will calculate completeness indexes by the age groups: 0,1-4,5-9,10-14,..., 80-84,85+ and for Calculate Standard Errors.

9. Press the Finish button at the bottom of the window. 

10. A Progress Window will be briefly displayed while ComPrev is calculating the complete prevalence statistics. When they are done, a window will be displayed that says "Data Not Found" for "Prostate / All Races / Female". This is correct, since there is no data for female prostate cancer. Press the Close button and the Main window will be displayed. 

11. On the left side of the Main Window, the list of cohorts to view are displayed. A cohort is the unique combination of all three by-var values. So for 4 sites, 1 race, and 2 sexes, we should have a total of 8 cohorts. However we were notified that there was no data for "Prostate / All Races / Female", so we actually have only 7 cohorts. You can select different cohorts to view by clicking on the checkboxes.

12. On the right side of the Main Window, 5 tabs are displayed. 

    • Incidence: You can view the incidence parameters used by ComPrev as a table or graph.

    • Survival: You can view the survival parameters used by ComPrev as a table or graph.

    • Completeness Index: Contains a table with completeness index and standard error (if requested) by age at prevalence as well as a graph of the completeness index.

    • Prevalence Estimates: This tab is disabled and only available for Complete Prevalence or Child Prevalence sessions. 

    • Settings: Displays all of the information you specified to create this session. 

13. Now we will export our results to a file. In the menu, select File, and Export. The Export window will be displayed to allow you to configure your export. At the top of the window is a box showing the path to where the files will be written. Click in the box at the end of the path, and type in the filename "Export1". All of the export files will be named with that filename as a prefix. In this example, the export files will be named Export1_Incidence.txt, Export1_Survival.txt, etc. The same goes for the graphs as well. 

14. Press the OK button at the bottom of the window. If all goes well, a message box will display telling you "Export completed successfully". If you go into the location where you exported, you will see a number of .txt and .png files. The .txt files are the export of the table data in a text file with tab delimiters. This information can be loaded directly into Excel. The .png files are image files of the graphs of your data. In the Export window, we used the option "Cohorts To Export" set to "Selected Cohorts", so only the data for All Sites, All Races, Male was actually exported.