# Clinical covariates (age, stage, nodes, treatment flags)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/clinical-covariates/  
OnCo record `clinical-covariates` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Clinical covariates are the ordinary facts about a patient, such as age, stage, node count and whether they had chemotherapy or radiotherapy, that any prognostic model must beat or build on.

## Summary

Survival models relate time to event to one or more covariates (Wikipedia on proportional hazards models). In cancer the routine ones are age, sex, stage, grade, nodal status, receptor status and treatment indicators for surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and endocrine therapy. A molecular or imaging model is only useful if it adds discrimination over a clinical baseline built from these, and treatment flags are confounders as well as predictors because sicker patients are treated differently.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: clinical covariates; clinical variables; treatment flags; radiotherapy flag; chemotherapy flag; clinical baseline model
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/clinical-variables.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_hazards_model
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_hazards_model

## Connected records

- terms: [AJCC stage (TNM staging manual)](https://onco.cc/terms/ajcc-stage/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [External validation](https://onco.cc/terms/external-validation/), [Grade versus stage](https://onco.cc/terms/grade-vs-stage/), [Lymph node status (node-positive / node-negative)](https://onco.cc/terms/lymph-node-status/), [Tissue-of-origin signal in tumour data](https://onco.cc/terms/organ-of-origin-signal/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/clinical-covariates.json