Comparing treatments in the presence of crossing survival curves: an application to bone marrow transplantation.

ABSTRACT: In some clinical studies comparing treatments in terms of their survival curves, researchers may anticipate that the survival curves will cross at some point, leading to interest in a long-term survival comparison. However, simple comparison of the survival curves at a fixed point may be inefficient, and use of a weighted log-rank test may be overly sensitive to early differences in survival. We formulate the problem as one of testing for differences in survival curves after a prespecified time point, and propose a variety of techniques for testing this hypothesis. We study these methods using simulation and illustrate them on a study comparing survival for autologous and allogeneic bone marrow transplants.

SUBMITTER: Logan BR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2754119 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature