2024 Volume 45 Issue 1 Pages 37-65
Survival analysis is usually necessary in the analysis of endpoints in oncology clinical trials. When the main interest lies in events other than death, death should be adequately handled statistically. Analysis where death events are censored has been shown to lead to erroneous conclusions; however, deaths are still censored in many oncology trials. Competing risks models where death is treated as a competing event is not widely used. In this paper, we discuss why death events should not be censored and provide an accessible introduction to competing risks analysis. Moreover, we explain multistate models, which can be viewed as an extension of competing risks models. By using multistate models, more clinical questions can be tackled, as shown in this paper.
