تحليل بقا

Survival Analysis

In many areas of health care research, the main outcome of interest is time to an event. For example, in cancer the event of interest is often death, though it could also be recurrence of disease. In a transplant setting the event could be failure of a graft or organ. In nursing-related studies the event of interest is the timeʹ from entry into a study/treatment/admission to the event in question, for some patients this event might not be observed, only that would have occurred at some time point beyond the observed time. Such patients are termed censored. It is the presence of censoring that makes the analysis of survival data so different and complex. We hope this paper will be of interest both statisticians and who are not primarily statisticians but who understand that advances in statistical methodology create the opportunities for more informative analysis of their data.