57
What Should We Do?
•Cannot
ignore
–These
are our treatment successes
•Cannot
just treat as binary (live/die) data:
–Potential
time of follow-up (censoring time) differs across subjects due to time
of study entry
•Confounding
vs loss of precision
–(Censored
data may also arise due to loss to follow-up, e.g., moved
away)
–(Could
figure out whether alive/dead at earliest censored observation, but
this is inefficient and may not answer the question of
interest)