Bias and Estimation Under Misspecification of the Risk Period in Self-Controlled Case Series Studies

• Activity Number: 31 - Categorical Data
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 29, 2018 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Danh Nguyen* and Luis Fernando Campos and Yanjun Chen and Damla Senturk
• Companies: University of California At Irvine and Harvard University and UC Irvine and UCLA, Dept. of Biostatistics
• Keywords: biostatistics; epidemiology; self-controlled case series; dialysis; hospitalization; cardiovascular events

Abstract

The self-controlled case series (SCCS) method is useful for estimating the relative incidence (RI) of acute events, such as adverse events (AEs) during a specified risk period following an exposure (e.g., 6-week period after vaccinations or 30-day period after infection-related hospitalizations). In practice, the "optimal" risk period is unknown and must be specified. We elucidate the bias of SCCS estimate of the RI when the risk period is misspecified and propose a novel method that more effectively estimates the optimal risk period and the associated RI of AEs. The proposed method is illustrated with a study to determine the risk of cardiovascular events after infection-related hospitalizations in older patients on dialysis.