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Comparing Treatments in the Presence of Crossing Survival Curves: An Application to Bone Marrow Transplantation
Author(s) -
Logan Brent R.,
Klein John P.,
Zhang MeiJie
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
biometrics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.298
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1541-0420
pISSN - 0006-341X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1541-0420.2007.00975.x
Subject(s) - survival analysis , log rank test , bone marrow transplantation , overall survival , point (geometry) , medicine , survival rate , bone marrow transplant , bone marrow , cell survival , mathematics , statistics , transplantation , oncology , surgery , biology , geometry , apoptosis , biochemistry
Summary 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.