Abstract
The REMARK (Reporting Recommendations for Tumor Marker Prognostic Studies) guideline includes a checklist which aims to improve the reporting of these types of studies. Here, we expand on the REMARK checklist to enhance its use and effectiveness through better understanding of the intent of each item and why the information is important to report. Each checklist item of the REMARK guideline is explained in detail and accompanied by published examples of good reporting. The paper provides a comprehensive overview to educate on good reporting and provide a valuable reference of issues to consider when designing, conducting, and analyzing tumor marker studies and prognostic studies in medicine in general.
Highlights
Even for randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are relatively straightforward, it is often impossible to understand from the text why the numbers of patients in analyses differs from the numbers enrolled in the trial
Examples ‘We evaluated the prognostic significance of three VEGF SNPs in a large cohort of patients with esophageal cancer
We showed that the heterozygous and homozygous variant genotype of VEGF 936C/T conferred an improved overall survival (OS) compared with the homozygous wild-type genotype
Summary
The purpose of this paper is to provide more complete explanations of each of the Reporting Recommendations for Tumor Marker Prognostic Studies (REMARK) checklist items and to provide specific examples of good reporting drawn from the published literature. The initial REMARK paper [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] recommended items that should be reported in all published tumor marker prognostic studies (Table 1). They were based on the rationale that more transparent and complete reporting of studies would enable others to better judge the usefulness of the data and to interpret the study results in the appropriate context. We hope that the current paper will serve an educational role and lead to more effective implementation of the REMARK recommendations, resulting in more consistent, high quality reporting of tumor marker studies
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