BACKGROUND Heart failure survival models typically are constructed using Cox proportional hazards regression. Regression modeling suffers from a number of limitations, including bias introduced by commonly used variable selection methods. We illustrate the value of an intuitive, robust approach to variable selection, random survival forests (RSF), in a large clinical cohort. RSF are a potential...

To assess the prognostic value of lymph node ratio (LNR) in patients with stage IV thyroid cancer based on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. A total of 4,940 eligible patients were included for the analysis. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazard regression were used to reveal the effect of LNR on overall survival (OS) and disease specific surv...

Diabetic nephropathy is one of three major complications of diabetes mellitus, often leading to chronic renal failure requiring dialysis. Recently developed dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors may exhibit renoprotective effects in addition to antihyperglycemic effects. In this study, we retrospectively investigated temporal changes in the renal function index of patients with type 2 diabe...

Standard quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping techniques commonly assume that the trait is both fully observed and normally distributed. When considering survival or age-at-onset traits these assumptions are often incorrect. Methods have been developed to map QTL for survival traits; however, they are both computationally intensive and not available in standard genome analysis software package...

In his discussion of Cox's (1972) paper on proportional hazards regression, Breslow (1972) provided the maximum likelihood estimator for the cumulative baseline hazard function. This estimator is commonly used in practice. The estimator has also been highly valuable in the further development of Cox regression and semiparametric inference with censored data. The present paper describes the Bres...

BACKGROUNDS Survival analysis is commonly used to determine the treatment effect among acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients who undergo allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) or other treatments. The aim of this study was to evaluate the use and reporting of survival analyses in these articles. METHODS We performed a systematic review by searching the MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochr...

miR-27a has been reported to exhibit abnormal expression in renal cell carcinoma (RCC), but the role of miR-27a in RCC remains unknown. In our study, up-regulation of miR-27a was validated by Real-time PCR analysis in 133 RCC samples. Overexpression of miR-27a promoted cell migration, invasion and proliferation in vitro, while its low expression exerted opposite effects. Kaplan-Meier analysis d...