Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2010
Abstract
Background: When a patient experiences an event other than the one of interest in the study, usually the probability of experiencing the event of interest is altered. By contrast, disease-free survival time analysis by standard methods, such as the Kaplan-Meier method and the standard Cox model, does not distinguish different causes in the presence of competing risks. Alternative approaches use the cumulative incidence estimator by the Cox models on cause-specific and on subdistribution hazards models. We applied cause-specific and subdistribution hazards models to a diabetes dataset with two competing risks (end-stage renal disease (ESRD) or death without ESRD) to measure the relative effects of covariates and cumulative incidence functions.
Results: In this study, the cumulative incidence curve of the risk of ESRD by the cause-specific hazards model was revealed to be higher than the curves generated by the subdistribution hazards model. However, the cumulative incidence curves of risk of death without ESRD based on those three models were very similar.
Conclusions: In analysis of competing risk data, it is important to present both the results of the event of interest and the results of competing risks. We recommend using either the cause-specific hazards model or the subdistribution hazards model for a dominant risk. However, for a minor risk, we do not recommend the subdistribution hazards model and a cause-specific hazards model is more appropriate. Focusing the interpretation on one or a few causes and ignoring the other causes is always associated with a risk of overlooking important features which may influence our interpretation.
Recommended Citation
Lim et al.: Methods of competing risks analysis of end-stage renal disease and mortality among people with diabetes. BMC Medical Research Methodology 2010 10:97. doi: 10.1186/1471-2288-10-97
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Comments
This article was originally published in the journal BMC Medical Research Methodology. It is posted here with the permission of the author.
Copyright © 2010 Lim et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.