Learning from big data: are we undertreating older women with high-risk breast cancer?

There is increasing interest in leveraging ‘big data’ to address important clinical questions, with the ultimate goal of improving human health, including outcomes for those with cancer.1 Examples include ‘CancerLinQ’, an initiative developed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology to improve patient care by integrating large volumes of clinical data with analytical computing tools,2 and ‘Sentinel’, an initiative developed by the United States (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration to improve drug safety monitoring after regulatory approval of new drugs.3 Mining the big data can sometimes lead to big surprises