Causal comparative effectiveness analysis of dynamic continuous-time treatment initiation rules with sparsely measured outcomes and death.

ABSTRACT: Evidence supporting the current World Health Organization recommendations of early antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation for adolescents is inconclusive. We leverage a large observational data and compare, in terms of mortality and CD4 cell count, the dynamic treatment initiation rules for human immunodeficiency virus-infected adolescents. Our approaches extend the marginal structural model for estimating outcome distributions under dynamic treatment regimes, developed in Robins et al. (2008), to allow the causal comparisons of both specific regimes and regimes along a continuum. Furthermore, we propose strategies to address three challenges posed by the complex data set: continuous-time measurement of the treatment initiation process; sparse measurement of longitudinal outcomes of inter

SUBMITTER: Hu L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9831746 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature