(This a general reminder for everyone, including myself, not a criticism of any specific forum participant).

I suggest that we laypeople be very careful about making our own charts and doing our own data comparisons from different studies with different methodologies, because we don't know what we don't know.

For example, most studies track *overall* survival (OS). Since the majority of prostate-cancer cases (not mine, sadly) occur late in life and develop slowly, many of the people in advanced stages might not have had 10 years left in any case, so the OS numbers are going to skew low.

Now, what if aggressive treatments like surgery are more common for younger patients than for elderly ones? That would mean that their OS numbers might come in higher even if the two treatments are equally effective, because the younger person is less likely to die from other causes in the next 10 years.

Researchers probably apply different statistical models (and some WAGs) to try to adjust for this, but if we laypeople just pull numbers haphazardly from different studies into a single table or graph, we won't have that benefit, and the results might be very misleading (as we saw with much of the amateur research during the COVID pandemic).