A Nested Accelerated Failure Time Model for Times to Disease Recurrence and Survival

• Activity Number: 336
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: ENAR
• Author(s): Xuelin Huang*+ and Jing Ning
• Companies: MD Anderson Cancer Center and The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
• Keywords: accelerated failure time model ; disease recurrence ; joint modeling ; nested model ; soft tissue sarcoma ; survival analysis

Abstract

Therapy for patients with a recurrent disease focuses on delaying disease recurrence and prolonging survival. A common analysis approach for such data is to estimate the distribution of disease-free survival, i.e., the time to the first disease recurrence or death, whichever happens first. However, treating death similarly as disease recurrence may give misleading results. We use a nested accelerated failure time model to simultaneously analyze disease recurrences and survival, and simultaneously analyze the effects of the initial treatment and treatment after disease recurrence. Separate parameters for disease recurrence and survival are used in the joint model to distinguish treatment effects on these two types of events. The proposed methods are evaluated by simulation studies, and illustrated by a real data set on soft tissue sarcoma patients.