JSM 2011 Online Program

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Abstract Details

Activity Number: 190
Type: Contributed
Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
Abstract - #302774
Title: The Probabilistic Distribution of Time to Relapse After Quitting Cigarette Smoking
Author(s): Lei Li*+
Companies: RTI International
Address: 3040 Cornwallis Road, RTP, NC, 27709,
Keywords: smoking ; survival analysis ; mixture Weibull function
Abstract:

To estimate the probability of relapsing after having quitted cigarette smoking we analyzed the data from the 1998-1999 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey on quitting smoking among former smokers who reported having smoked at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetime and smoked daily. The Kaplan-Meier survival functions were first plotted for the time to relapse and then the mixture Weibull survival functions of the form S(t) = p x exp(-mtk) + (1-p), where (1-p) is the assumed proportion of permanent quitters, were used to fit the probabilistic distribution of the time to relapse by age and gender groups. The maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters m, k, and p were obtained via the EM algorithm. The estimated mixture survival functions were close to the Kaplan-Meier estimates. The hazard rate of relapsing was clearly not a constant due to the likely presence of a fraction of permanent quitters. Most of the relapses occurred within the first 100 days since quitting smoking and the relapse rate was nearly negligible beyond 200 days of abstinence.


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