| Abstract
| - SUMMARY. Clinicians often wish to know if and when patients with cancer or other life-threatening diseases can be considered cured. Although some parametric approaches are available, no nonparametric methods exist for treating this question. Here, a nonparametric procedure based on the definition that cure occurs when the hazard for death among patients is no longer greater than the hazard among subjects in the general population with similar age and demographic characteristics is developed. It is argued that the use of a fully nonparametric approach cannot lead to a nontrivial upper confidence bound for time to cure, and an approach to computing lower confidence bounds for time to cure is developed and applied to data from a clinical trial in colorectal cancer.
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