Performance of floating absolute risks.
A recent investigation of hormone replacement therapy and breast cancer risk used a method called "floating absolute risks" (FARs) to compute confidence intervals for relative hazards. This method has been used in other medical studies and has received controversy. This controversy stems from the correct implementation of this method. However, there has been no direct comparison of the FAR method, as it is sometimes incorrectly applied and reported, with the conventional approach for computing confidence intervals from proportional hazards regression. In this paper, the author reports simulation results comparing these two methods and demonstrates that the FAR method, when applied incorrectly, can produce confidence intervals that are substantially too narrow.
Arbogast
Patrick G
PG
Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37232-2158, USA. patrick.arbogast@vanderbilt.edu
D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D006305:Health Status Indicators; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016016:Proportional Hazards Models; D012044:Regression Analysis; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012307:Risk Factors; D016019:Survival Analysis