A Simulation Platform for Quantifying Survival Bias: An Application to Research on Determinants of Cognitive Decline.

ABSTRACT: Bias due to selective mortality is a potential concern in many studies and is especially relevant in cognitive aging research because cognitive impairment strongly predicts subsequent mortality. Biased estimation of the effect of an exposure on rate of cognitive decline can occur when mortality is a common effect of exposure and an unmeasured determinant of cognitive decline and in similar settings. This potential is often represented as collider-stratification bias in directed acyclic graphs, but it is difficult to anticipate the magnitude of bias. In this paper, we present a flexible simulation platform with which to quantify the expected bias in longitudinal studies of determinants of cognitive decline. We evaluated potential survival bias in naive analyses under several selective survi

SUBMITTER: Mayeda ER 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5013884 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature