Time to event analysis in the presence of competing risks

Excerpt

Time to event (e.g., death or hospitalization) is a typical outcome of interest in medical research. It is not uncommon to see researchers use all-cause mortality as event of interest, consequently, treating various causes of death the same way. Standard methods are applied to analyze such outcomes: Kaplan-Meier curve to display the estimated survival curve, log rank test to compare survival curves of independent groups, and Cox proportional hazards to model the relationship between outcome and a set of predictor variables and covariates. Time to event for some subjects may not be observed due to end of study or because the subject dropped out. These observations are known to be right-censored and contain the information that the unknown event time is past the observed censored time. …