The EBMT statistical sub-committee was established by the EBMT Board in June 2004 and held its first meeting in Paris on December 2nd 2005. |
At its inception in 1975, one of the primary aims of the EBMT was to collect data on all patients transplanted with
haemopoietic stem cells, with a view to performing retrospective analyses. These analytical studies have proved to be challenging for clinicians and statisticians alike, and so the establishment of the EBMT statistical subcommittee is an attempt to provide a body that will educate, advise and promote appropriate statistical methodologies.
Major issues include the collection of good quality data and proper interpretation of results. We thus plan to work in the following different fields:
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1. Education, statistical support and information for all EBMT members
2. Standardisation of the approaches to statistical analyses performed by the different Working Parties (WPs)
3. Cooperation with other groups and coordination with other EBMT subcommittees
4. Methodological research
Some problems remain to be resolved, for example:
1. There is no statistician working full time for the EBMT
2. Some WPs have no dedicated statistician
3. Lack of uniformity in the statistical methods used in retrospective or prospective trials
4. No grant has been dedicated for research into novel statistical methods. |
The number of members has increased from five to twelve following the last meeting:
Statisticians: Myriam Labopin (Paris), Ronald Brand (Leiden), Simona Iacobeli (Roma), Stefan Suciu (EORTC, Brussels), Richard Szydlo (London), Jean-Yves Mary (Paris), Sandrine Katsahian (Paris), Ulrike Poetschger (Vienna)
Data managers: Emmanuelle Polge (Paris), Irina Ionescu (Paris), Antonella Santucci (Perugia), David Pacheco (Paris)
Clinicians: Vanderson Rocha (Paris), Vincent Levy (Paris)
A rough delineation of duties requires that statisticians are responsible for education, organisation of meetings, searching for funding, and implementation of the web site. Data managers and clinicians are responsible for coordination with other committees, improvement of the data quality and homogeneity of studies. 
1. A Statistical Subcommittee section of the EBMT web site has been implemented with:
• statistical guidelines
• the possibility for each EBMT member to contact a statistician for advice. (To date most requests have been generated by clinicians and WP chairpersons). 2. Two meetings have been organized. The first was the annual statistical symposium during the EBMT meeting in Prague in March 2005; the second was a new workshop during the ESH-EBMT meeting in Lisbon in May 2005 which focused on survival analysis.
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Firstly, we will very shortly circulate a survey asking all EBMT members to define their needs of the statistical sub-committee.
Secondly, we wish to increase communication between statisticians, WPs and subcommittees, and thus we aim to create a ‘web forum', where members provide information on what has been done within each WP. Such a “forum” would be accessible to each statistician involved in analysing BMT data. Thirdly we plan to check the quality of the data, especially missing data that leads to population with respect to type of patients, centres, and/or time period. 
Two meetings are already planned:
- Annual Statistical Symposium during the EBMT meeting in Hamburg.
- ESH-EBMT training course in transplantation: workshop planned for May 2006 in Warsaw, Poland.
We would like to draw your attention to the Statistical Symposium at EBMT 2006 in Hamburg on Tuesday 21st March, 16.30 – 18.30 in Hall 13/14. It is especially dedicated to an audience of clinicians and data-managers and will contain lectures on “statistics for non-statisticians”. We hope that you can join us.
Myriam Labopin
Chair of Statistical Sub-committee
labopin@chusa.jussieu.fr |
