Survival analysis in clinical trials: Basics and must know areas

Abstract

Many clinical trials involve following patients for a long time. The primary event of interest in those studies is death, relapse, adverse drug reaction or development of a new disease. The follow-up time for the study may range from few weeks to many years. A different set of statistical procedures are employed to analyze the data, which involves time to event an analysis. It is a very useful tool in clinical research and provides invaluable information about an intervention. This article introduces the researcher to the different tools of survival analysis.

Keywords

• Cox proportional hazard model
• hazard ratio
• survival analysis