Faculty Collaboration Database

Confidence bands for the difference of two survival curves under proportional hazards model. Lifetime Data Anal 2001 Sep;7(3):243-54

Date

10/27/2001

Pubmed ID

11677829

DOI

10.1023/a:1011636407958

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-0035460536 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site)   24 Citations

Abstract

A common approach to testing for differences between the survival rates of two therapies is to use a proportional hazards regression model which allows for an adjustment of the two survival functions for any imbalance in prognostic factors in the comparison. When the relative risk of one treatment to the other is not constant over time the question of which therapy has a survival advantage is difficult to determine from the Cox model. An alternative approach to this problem is to plot the difference between the two predicted survival functions with a confidence band that provides information about when these two treatments differ. Such a band will depend on the covariate values of a given patient. In this paper we show how to construct a confidence band for the difference of two survival functions based on the proportional hazards model. A simulation approach is used to generate the bands. This approach is used to compare the survival probabilities of chemotherapy and allogeneic bone marrow transplants for chronic leukemia.

Author List

Zhang MJ, Klein JP

Author

Mei-Jie Zhang PhD Professor in the Institute for Health and Equity department at Medical College of Wisconsin

MESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold

Adolescent
Adult
Antineoplastic Combined Chemotherapy Protocols
Bone Marrow Transplantation
Combined Modality Therapy
Confidence Intervals
Humans
Leukemia, Myelogenous, Chronic, BCR-ABL Positive
Middle Aged
Proportional Hazards Models
Survival Analysis