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How many non-tumor samples needed for survival analysis?

Hi All, I've been working on my own survival analysis of PDAC, following the tutorial Survival analysis of TCGA patients integrating gene expression (RNASeq) data, but after I separated the tumor and non-tumor samples, I found that there were 179 tumor samples but only 4 non-tumor samples. I don't have too much experience with bioinformatics but I believe that 4 samples does not carry enough statistical weight even though they're normal samples to compare the cancer against and I was wondering if someone could confirm or correct me? If 4 samples is not enough, does anyone know how to find non-tumor samples in other databases like GEO? Thanks

rna-seq
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updated by EagleEye EagleEye • written by jzhou • jzhou

1 answer

For survival analysis there is no need for non-tumor samples, it should be carried out only using tumor samples. The non-tumor samples are important when you perform differential expression analysis.

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written by EagleEye EagleEye

Thanks for a quick reply!

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written by jzhou • jzhou

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