title: Comparing treatments in the presence of crossing survival curves: an application to bone marrow transplantation.
abstract: In some clinical studies comparing treatments in terms of their survival curves, researchers may anticipate that the survival curves will cross at some point, leading to interest in a long-term survival comparison. However, simple comparison of the survival curves at a fixed point may be inefficient, and use of a weighted log-rank test may be overly sensitive to early differences in survival. We formulate the problem as one of testing for differences in survival curves after a prespecified time point, and propose a variety of techniques for testing this hypothesis. We study these methods using simulation and illustrate them on a study comparing survival for autologous and allogeneic bone marrow transplants.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biostatistics, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53226, U.S.A.
authors.forename: Brent R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Logan
authors.affiliation: Division of Biostatistics, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53226, U.S.A.
authors.forename: John P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Klein
authors.affiliation: Division of Biostatistics, Medical College of Wisconsin, 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53226, U.S.A.
authors.forename: Mei-Jie
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D001699:Biometry / Q000379:methods*; D016026:Bone Marrow Transplantation / Q000401:mortality* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D018572:Disease-Free Survival; D006801:Humans; D053208:Kaplan-Meier Estimate; D008224:Lymphoma, Follicular / Q000401:mortality / Q000628:therapy; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016019:Survival Analysis; D014182:Transplantation, Autologous; D014184:Transplantation, Homologous