Evaluating mortality in intensive care units contribution of competing risks analyses.docVIP

Available online /content/10/1/R5 Research Open Access Vol 10 No 1 Evaluating mortality in intensive care units: contribution of competing risks analyses Matthieu Resche-Rigon1, Elie Azoulay2 and Sylvie Chevret3 1Medical Doctor, Biostatistics Department, Saint Louis Teaching Hospital-Assistance Publique-H?pitaux de Paris, 1 avenue Claude Vellefaux, Paris, 75010, France 2Medical Doctor, Medical Intensive Care Unit, Saint Louis Teaching Hospital-Assistance Publique-H?pitaux de Paris, 1 avenue Claude Vellefaux, Paris, 75010, France 3Medical Doctor, Biostatistics Department, Saint Louis Teaching Hospital-Assistance Publique-H?pitaux de Paris, 1 avenue Claude Vellefaux, Paris, 75010, France Corresponding author: Elie Azoulay, elie.azoulay@sls.ap-hop-paris.fr Received: 20 May 2005 Revisions requested: 27 May 2005 Revisions received: 8 Sep 2005 Accepted: 27 Oct 2005 Published: 1 Dec 2005 Critical Care 2006, 10:R5 (doi:10.1186/cc3921) This article is online at: /content/10/1/R5 ? 2005 Resche-Rigon et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Introduction Kaplan–Meier curves and logistic models are widely used to describe and explain the variability of survival in intensive care unit (ICU) patients. The Kaplan–Meier approach considers that patients discharged alive from hospital are non- informatively censored (for instance, representative of all other individuals who have survived to that time but are still in hospital); this is probably wrong. Logistic models are adapted to this so-called competing risks setting but fail to take into account censoring and differences in exposure time. To address these issues, we exemplified the usefulness of standard models and logistic