Imatinib in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia

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Abstract
Druker et al. (Dec. 7 issue)1 update the data for patients who received imatinib as first-line therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). However, they do not present most of the data according to the intention-to-treat principle. The survival curves in the article were obtained by censoring data from considerable numbers of patients who did not adhere to the treatment. We infer from Figure 2 of the article that data for 111 of the 553 patients who were assigned to receive imatinib (20%) were censored before month 48 for the analysis of survival without progression, and we infer from Figure 4 that data for 26 of 553 patients (5%) were censored for the analysis of overall survival. We suggest the presentation of additional survival curves derived from a strict intention-to-treat approach, in which all patients were followed either until the end of the observation period or until the occurrence of a classifying event (e.g., death, an accelerated phase, or blast crisis for modified event-free survival).

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