Therese Andersson

Therese Andersson

Senior Lecturer | Docent
Visiting address: ,
Postal address: C8 Medicinsk epidemiologi och biostatistik, C8 MEB II Andersson, 171 77 Stockholm
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About me

  • I am a biostatistician, working with statistical methods for cancer
    epidemiology. My main research interest is cancer patient survival and I have
    published studies on cancer patient survival for a range of cancer sites. I
    have also worked on international benchmarking of cancer patient survival,
    for example the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership SURVMARK-2, run
    by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and in a Nordic
    collaborative project. I develop statistical methods as well as apply the
    methods to register-based data to answer important epidemiological and
    clinical research questions. I’m currently
    working in several projects, a description of two projects I'm heavily
    involved with currently are described below.

Research

  • *Loss in life expectancy due to cancer*
    One useful summary measure for survival data is the life expectancy, which is
    calculated by obtaining the area under a survival curve. Life expectancy is a
    well-established, easily understood concept that quantifies the expected
    number of life years remaining. In comparison to many other measures, it
    takes the whole time scale into account instead of at particular points
    during follow-up (such as the 1- or 5-year survival). Another statistic,
    closely related to the life expectancy, is the loss in life expectancy (LLE),
    a measure of how much a patient's life expectancy is reduced due to a cancer
    diagnosis. The LLE is defined as the difference in life expectancy between
    the cancer patients and a comparable group in the general population. The
    LLE can be used to address a wide range of research questions on both
    individual and population levels, and to quantify survival differences
    between groups. Another use of LLE is to quantify the burden of cancer on
    society as the total number of life years lost in the population
  • in this
    way, it can be useful for measuring cancer control progress and to provide
    guidance for resource allocation. I have developed methods for estimating the
    LLE for cancer patients, and further extend and evaluate the methodology to
    enable use of the measure in different contexts.
    *Survival after hematological cancers, with a focus on MPN*
    Compared to many other hematological
    malignancies MPNs are rather indolent diseases. Despite efforts to optimize
    treatment and prophylactic measures, patients with MPNs have a shorter
    survival than the general population and experience complications, such as
    thromboembolism and bleedings, due to their MPN. There are few
    population-based studies on MPNs, and most studies are small with short
    follow-up time and do not include population controls. It is therefore of
    great importance to gain a further understanding of the disease trajectory
    and risk of complications for this group of patients. By taking advantage of
    the Swedish health registers and novel statistical methods, we will improve
    the understanding of the clinical course and prognosis among MPN patients.

Teaching

  • I have been involved in teaching and/or course organising of:
    * Development of a MSc programme in Biostatistics and Data Science given within the Stockholm Trio, i.e. Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University.
    * Survival analysis (biostat III), within the Doctoral Programme in
    Epidemiology
    * Data Management within epidemiological research, including lectures on
    laws and regulations concerning the use of personal data in research
    * Competing risks and multistate models
    * IARC summer school on cancer epidemiology, module 1, cancer survival
    methods for cancer registries.
    * Summer school on modern methods in biostatistics and epidemiology.
    Survival analysis using Stata (a 1-day course) and Statistical Methods for
    Population-based Cancer Survival (a 1-week course). Treviso, Italy.
    * Workshops on epidemiological designs and cancer survival analysis
    * Pre-conference courses on Statistical Methods for Population-based Cancer
    Survival
    * Biostatistics/evidence based medicine within the medical program at KI

Articles

All other publications

Selected grants

Grants

Employments

  • Senior Lecturer, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, 2020-
  • Postdoctoral Researcher, Danish Cancer Society, 2015-2016

Degrees and Education

  • Docent, Karolinska Institutet, 2020
  • Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, 2013
  • MSc, Mathematical Statistics, Uppsala University, 2007

Supervisor

  • Jonatan Hedberg, Approaches for dealing with missing tumour stage at diagnosis with applications to colorectal cancer and its impact on work-related outcomes, 2024
  • Anna Oksanen, Loss of life expectancy for patients with malignant melanoma, by socioeconomic groups and sex, 2023
  • Nurgul Betyrbekova, Modeling multiple time-scales with flexible parametric survival models – with applications to Myeloproliferative Neoplasm (MPN), 2019
  • Yuliya Leontyeva, Development, extensions and applications of statistical models in population-based studies to estimate loss in expectation of life (LEL) due to cancer., 2019
  • Hannah Bower, Flexible parametric models for cancer patient survival: loss in expectation of life and further developments, https://openarchive.ki.se/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10616/46179/Thesis_Hannah_Bower.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

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