Mediation Analysis for Censored Survival Data Under an Accelerated Failure Time Model.

ABSTRACT: Recent advances in causal mediation analysis have formalized conditions for estimating direct and indirect effects in various contexts. These approaches have been extended to a number of models for survival outcomes including accelerated failure time models, which are widely used in a broad range of health applications given their intuitive interpretation. In this setting, it has been suggested that under standard assumptions, the "difference" and "product" methods produce equivalent estimates of the indirect effect of exposure on the survival outcome. We formally show that these two methods may produce substantially different estimates in the presence of censoring or truncation, due to a form of model misspecification. Specifically, we establish that while the product method remains valid

SUBMITTER: Fulcher IR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5756668 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature