Are you talking about
published curves or the online nomograms or what? I can only recall seeing mortality (not morbidity) curves in the articles I reviewed. What was the definition/criteria for recurrance?
Of course one has to be very careful to interpret statistics correctly. For example, with the mortality curves for death due to PCa after surgery, there are several causal possibilities which could produce the same curve shape. E.g. one case could be that most of the recurrances occur early after surgery, but it takes a relatively long time to exhaust effective treatment options and finally succumb to the disease. Or, an alternate case is that the disease course is shorter and it takes longer on average for the disease to recur.
Which case was true would make a difference in how to interpret the info to determine your probabilities at a given point in time. In the first case, each year you are disease free resets your point on the graph to the zero point and your probability of death due to recurrance remains very low. In the second case you are walking along the curve year after year and your cumulative recurrance chances increase.
I honestly don't know which case is true. But I think it is more like the former case than the latter. Anyone have better insights?