BACKGROUND Factors predicting survival in men with lymph node-positive prostate cancer are still poorly defined. PATIENTS AND METHODS 193 prostate cancer patients with histopathologically proven lymph node involvement with a median follow-up of 7.3 years were studied. 94% of patients received immediate hormonal therapy. Kaplan-Meier curves were calculated to evaluate overall survival rates an...

Aortic gradient and aortic regurgitation are echocardiographic markers of aortic valve function. Both are biomarkers repeatedly measured in patients with valve abnormalities, and thus, it is expected that they are biologically interrelated. Loss of follow-up could be caused by multiple reasons, including valve progression related, such as an intervention or even the death of the patient. In tha...

In many countries, competing health plans receive capitation payments from a sponsor, whether government or a private employer. All capitation payment methods are far from perfect and have raised concerns about risk selection. Paying health plans partly on the basis of capitation and partly on the basis of actual costs ("risk sharing") reduces plans' incentives for selection but sacrifices some...

Survival analyses are commonly applied to study death or other events of interest. In such analyses, so-called competing risks may form an important problem. A competing risk is an event that either hinders the observation of the event of interest or modifies the chance that this event occurs. For example, when studying death on dialysis, receiving a kidney transplant is an event that competes ...

BACKGROUND Decision curve analysis is a novel method for evaluating diagnostic tests, prediction models and molecular markers. It combines the mathematical simplicity of accuracy measures, such as sensitivity and specificity, with the clinical applicability of decision analytic approaches. Most critically, decision curve analysis can be applied directly to a data set, and does not require the s...

Few risk tools have been proposed to quantify the long-term risk of diabetes among middle-aged and elderly individuals in China. The present study aimed to develop a risk tool to estimate the 20-year risk of developing diabetes while incorporating competing risks. A three-stage stratification random-clustering sampling procedure was conducted to ensure the representativeness of the Beijing elde...

BACKGROUND Chronic kidney disease (CKD) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection are closely linked and both increase patient mortality. The association of HCV and risk of developing end-stage renal disease (ESRD) has not been analyzed with competing risk model. METHOD We enrolled a prospective cohort of 4,185 patients (mean age, 62 years; 41% female) registered in the CKD integrated care progra...

In the Prostate Cancer Intervention Versus Observation Trial (PIVOT), surgery was not associated with lower mortality compared with observation. However, the high competing mortality rate of approximately 33% after 10 yr among the PIVOT study population has raised concerns on the generalizability of these results. We investigated 4282 patients who underwent radical prostatectomy at our institut...