학술논문

Estimation of the Standardized Risk Difference and Ratio in a Competing Risks Framework: Application to Injection Drug Use and Progression to AIDS After Initiation of Antiretroviral Therapy
Document Type
article
Source
American Journal of Epidemiology. 181(4)
Subject
Epidemiology
Health Sciences
HIV/AIDS
Sexually Transmitted Infections
Drug Abuse (NIDA only)
Clinical Research
Infectious Diseases
Substance Misuse
6.1 Pharmaceuticals
Evaluation of treatments and therapeutic interventions
Good Health and Well Being
Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
Adult
Black or African American
Anti-HIV Agents
Cohort Studies
Disease Progression
Female
Follow-Up Studies
Hispanic or Latino
Humans
Incidence
Male
Mathematical Computing
Middle Aged
Odds Ratio
Risk Assessment
Risk Factors
Substance Abuse
Intravenous
Survival Rate
United States
AIDS
cohort study
competing risks
HIV
survival function
CNICS Research Network
Mathematical Sciences
Medical and Health Sciences
Language
Abstract
There are few published examples of absolute risk estimated from epidemiologic data subject to censoring and competing risks with adjustment for multiple confounders. We present an example estimating the effect of injection drug use on 6-year risk of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) after initiation of combination antiretroviral therapy between 1998 and 2012 in an 8-site US cohort study with death before AIDS as a competing risk. We estimate the risk standardized to the total study sample by combining inverse probability weights with the cumulative incidence function; estimates of precision are obtained by bootstrap. In 7,182 patients (83% male, 33% African American, median age of 38 years), we observed 6-year standardized AIDS risks of 16.75% among 1,143 injection drug users and 12.08% among 6,039 nonusers, yielding a standardized risk difference of 4.68 (95% confidence interval: 1.27, 8.08) and a standardized risk ratio of 1.39 (95% confidence interval: 1.12, 1.72). Results may be sensitive to the assumptions of exposure-version irrelevance, no measurement bias, and no unmeasured confounding. These limitations suggest that results be replicated with refined measurements of injection drug use. Nevertheless, estimating the standardized risk difference and ratio is straightforward, and injection drug use appears to increase the risk of AIDS.