Dear May,
I have not yet read the paper you refer to but will do so. Meanwhile:
I wonder how the technique cited handles death as a competing
risk. Shawn's question was on mortality. If death from competing causes is
handled as censored, Cox will not give the right answer. When a subject is
censored from analysis, he or she is still modeled as being at risk of the
event of interest. However, if the patient died, he or she will not be at
risk of further events, and Cox normally produces an overestimate of
mortality.
I other words, how does the result of this method compare with the one
obtained with competing risks proportional hazards regression, the
competing risk equivalent of Cox regression.
T Kivela
On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, May Boggess wrote:
> On Wednesday, Shawn asked about competing risks analysis:
>
> > I am trying to do an analysis of competing-cause mortality. I have a
> > mortality dataset where I have death (yes/no) and among those who died,
> > whether it was a specific type of death (yes/no).
>
> > Initially, I used stset with any-cause death as my failure, then repeated
> > the analysis with type-specific death as failure. I've been told that's
> > incorrect, because it treats those who died from another cause as just being
> > censored, and doesn't allow me to examine whether my exposure of interest
> > also increases the non-specific cause of death. I was told I need to do
> > competing-cause mortality, to see how my exposure impacts both the
> > type-specific and the other causes of death.
>
> Tero Kivela gave the following suggestions:
> >
> > Enzo Coviello's very handy -stcompet- ado-file will solve your problem if
> > you need a Kaplan-Meire type analysis. If you need an equivalent of
> > Cox regression, Stata doen not help you (yet).
>
> It is possible to use Cox regression for competing risks in Stata.
> There is a very nice paper by Lunn and McNeil
> "Applying Cox regression to competing risks" Biometrics 51, 524-532, June 1995.
> They go through a number of different methods, none of which is the method
> mentioned in the multiple risk FAQ.
>
> Below is the example from a response to a Statalist question I gave
> a few weeks go.
>
> Here I will give examples of the different methods. I am going to keep
> it relatively simple by sticking to non-repeated failures, in other
> words, each subject is either censored or suffers one event, which in
> this example will be one of two types.
>
> First I need to create an appropriate dataset. I will begin with the
> following:
>
> clear
> sysuse cancer
> set seed 12345
> drop died
> gen id=_n
> move id st
> gen death=int(uniform()*3)
> list
>
> Here death=0 is censored and 1 and 2 are the competing events.
>
> For competing risks is that we need one record for each failure type for
> each subject. This is the "expanded" dataset. Continuing where we left
> off:
>
> expand 2
> bysort id : gen type = _n
> gen status=(type==death)
> recode type (1=0)(2=1)
> list, sepby(id)
> stset studytime, f(status)
>
> Now we have two records per subject and status is our failure variable.
> For each subject, having two zeroes means censored. We have the
> following choices for models:
>
> * risk type as covariate with interactions (Lunn & McNeal Method A)
> gen aget=age*type
> gen drugt=drug*type
> stcox type drug age drugt aget, nolog nohr cluster(id)
> estimates store methodA
>
> * risk type as covariate with interactions only (Lunn & McNeal Table 2)
> stcox type drugt aget, nolog nohr cluster(id)
> estimates store table2
>
> * risk type as strata (as in FAQ)
> stcox drug age, strata(type) nolog nohr cluster(id)
> estimates store faq
>
> * risk type as strata with interactions (Lunn & McNeal Method B)
> stcox drug age drugt aget, strata(type) nolog nohr cluster(id)
> estimates store methodB
>
>
> I have saved the estimates from each of the models so that if I wanted
> to compare them I could do so as follows:
>
> estimates table _all, stats(aic bic)
>
> -- May
> [email protected]
>
> *
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>
*
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