title: Predicting the duration of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia: new scores and validation.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  the objective of this study was to develop predictive models to classify febrile neutropenic patients into two groups, according to a prediction of the duration of the chemotherapy-induced neutropenia episode.
  
  
  METHODS
  for this retrospective analysis, 106 patients with solid tumours and an episode of febrile neutropenia (FN) were eligible. A score was attributed to each chemotherapy treatment drug according to its expected toxicity. Three new scores were proposed based only on this classification. Two of them are a combination of the individual drug scores and the third one was built using statistical techniques such as cluster analysis and classification trees.
  
  
  RESULTS
  statistical techniques produced the best score, distinguishing two groups of patients with statistically different neutropenia durations, with median durations until haematological recovery of absolute neutrophil count 2 × 10(9)/l of 4 versus 2 days (P < 0.001).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  our methodological approach based on statistical techniques identifies the patients who will need the longest times to recover from FN. The input of this predictive system is only the aggressiveness of the cytotoxic agents in a chemotherapy regimen. Our proposal succeeded in distinguishing two groups of patients and the results show better performance than other scores in previous studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Statistics, Operations Research and Quality, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia. Electronic address: ssanmat@eio.upv.es.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: San Matías
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Statistics, Operations Research and Quality, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Clemente
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Statistics, Operations Research and Quality, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Valencia.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Giner-Bosch
authors.affiliation: Oncology Unit, Hospital de Sagunto, Sagunto, Spain.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Giner
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000465:Algorithms; D000970:Antineoplastic Agents / Q000009:adverse effects*; D005260:Female; D005334:Fever / Q000097:blood; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009503:Neutropenia / Q000139:chemically induced* / Q000145:classification*; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D000970:Antineoplastic Agents