Journal
STATISTICS IN MEDICINE
Volume 36, Issue 8, Pages 1203-1209Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/sim.7215
Keywords
competing risks; randomized controlled trial; RCT; survival analysis; systematic review
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Funding
- Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES)
- Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC)
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (MOP) [86508]
- Heart and Stroke Foundation
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In studies with survival or time-to-event outcomes, a competing risk is an event whose occurrence precludes the occurrence of the primary event of interest. Specialized statistical methods must be used to analyze survival data in the presence of competing risks. We conducted a review of randomized controlled trials with survival outcomes that were published in high-impact general medical journals. Of 40 studies that we identified, 31 (77.5%) were potentially susceptible to competing risks. However, in the majority of these studies, the potential presence of competing risks was not accounted for in the statistical analyses that were described. Of the 31 studies potentially susceptible to competing risks, 24 (77.4%) reported the results of a Kaplan-Meier survival analysis, while only five (16.1%) reported using cumulative incidence functions to estimate the incidence of the outcome over time in the presence of competing risks. The former approach will tend to result in an overestimate of the incidence of the outcome over time, while the latter approach will result in unbiased estimation of the incidence of the primary outcome over time. We provide recommendations on the analysis and reporting of randomized controlled trials with survival outcomes in the presence of competing risks. (C) 2017 The Authors. Statistics in Medicine published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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