- Title
- Survival studies: Competing risks, immortality and censoring
- Creator
- Barnett, Adrian G.; Oldmeadow, Christopher; Attia, John R.
- Relation
- Medical Journal of Australia Vol. 208, Issue 11, p. 475-477
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.5694/mja17.00171
- Publisher
- John Wiley & Sons
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- One of the simplest study designs is giving participants — with a headache, for example — an active pill or placebo at random and then observing their outcome of cured or not cured one hour later. Studies with such short time frames are rare, and meaningful outcomes, such as disease or death, often need to be followed up long after the initial contact, potentially decades later. If time is an integral part of a study, then a key issue is what else happened to the participants during the time between their recruitment and the time at which we tried to record their outcomes. If we did not find them, is that because they emigrated or died? If they died, was their death related to their original illness? Did they take some other therapy in the interim? Time complicates all studies, but most complications can be managed by collecting detailed data on participants over time and using survival analysis.
- Subject
- biostatistics; data interpretation; statistical; humans; survival; models
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1441307
- Identifier
- uon:41383
- Identifier
- ISSN:0025-729X
- Language
- eng
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