Assessing exposure-time treatment effect heterogeneity in stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials.

ABSTRACT: A stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial (CRT) is a unidirectional crossover study in which timings of treatment initiation for clusters are randomized. Because the timing of treatment initiation is different for each cluster, an emerging question is whether the treatment effect depends on the exposure time, namely, the time duration since the initiation of treatment. Existing approaches for assessing exposure-time treatment effect heterogeneity either assume a parametric functional form of exposure time or model the exposure time as a categorical variable, in which case the number of parameters increases with the number of exposure-time periods, leading to a potential loss in efficiency. In this article, we propose a new model formulation for assessing treatment effect heterogeneity over

SUBMITTER: Maleyeff L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10203056 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature