Testing the treatment effect on competing causes of death in oncology clinical trials.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Chemotherapy is expected to reduce cancer deaths (CD), while possibly being harmful in terms of non-cancer deaths (NCD) because of toxicity. Peto's log-rank test is popular in the medical literature, but its operating characteristics are barely known. We compared this test to the most common ones in the statistical literature: the cause-specific hazard test and Gray's test on the hazard of the subdistribution. We investigated for the first time the impact of reclassifications of causes of death (CoD) after recurrences, and of misclassification of CoD.

Methods

We present a simulation study in which we varied the censoring rate and the correlation between CD and NCD times, we generated recurrence times to study the role of the reclassification of CoD, and we added 2

SUBMITTER: Rotolo F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4047005 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature