“…For example, we could not examine survival in relation to previous chemotherapy treatment due to the unavailability of this information in the SEER Limited-Use Data. Furthermore, there are several factors that have been shown to predict survival in MDS which are not available in these data, such as cytogenetic abnormalities [4,6,31], blast counts [4,6,31], number of dysplastic lineages [4,6], and blood cell counts [6,32]. The International Prognostic Scoring System (IPSS) divides patients into four distinct groups based on percentage of bone marrow blasts, cytogenetic abnormalities, and number of peripheral blood cytopenias [6].…”