Employing competing risks analysis in an aging population where many patients die from other causes

Abstract

Survival analysis is the study of time-to-event (TTE) data and is defined by both whether an outcome of interest has occurred and when it occurred [1]. The most common TTE endpoint in clinical cancer research is overall survival (OS), which calculates time from a baseline such as initial date of surgery until a patient has died (event of interest) or until last date known to be alive. Censoring occurs in TTE analyses when subjects do not experience the event of interest during the follow-up observation period.