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Multilevel Survival Analysis - Cox PH Model

5 messages · David Winsemius, Bert Gunter, dunner

#
Hello all, thanks for your time and patience.

I'm looking for a method in R to analyse the following data:

Time to waking after anaesthetic for medical procedures repeated on the same
individual.
labelled [1:740, 1:2] 20  20  15  20  30+ 40+ 50  30  15  10  ...
 - attr(*, "dimnames")=List of 2
  ..$ : NULL
  ..$ : chr [1:2] "time" "status"
 - attr(*, "type")= chr "right"
 - attr(*, "units")= chr "Day"
 - attr(*, "time.label")= chr "ORIENTATION"
 - attr(*, "event.label")= chr "FullyOrientated"

mysurv is constructed from the following data:

head(data.frame(MRN, ORIENTATION, FullyOrientated))

       MRN ORIENTATION FullyOrientated
1 0008291           20               2
2 0008469           20               2
3 0008469           15               2
4 0010188           20               2
5 0013664           30               1
6 0014217           40               1


I had planned to use a Cox PH model to analyse time to waking (ORIENTATION =
10, 15, 20 mins ....... 50 mins) and whether or not people (MRN) are fully
awake within an hour (FullyOrientated). I've put  GENDER, etc. into the
model but I have the following bias:

The procedure is repeated weekly on each individual (MRN), so each
individual has 5-9 cases associated with them. Currently I am including
these in the model as if they were independent. 

Is there a way to account for the non-independence of these waking times?

I'm thinking of something similar to the NLMER package and Multilevel /
Mixed Effects analysis as described in Pinheiro and Bates.

I'd be appreciative of any help at all?

Thanks again,

R


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#
On Jul 1, 2011, at 10:10 AM, dunner wrote:

            
Have you looked at the coxme package?
#
On Jul 1, 2011, at 10:22 AM, David Winsemius wrote:

            
As an initial strata()-gem, as it were, perhaps just adding  
strata(MRN) may parcel out the intra-individual variability and  
degrees of freedom, so that they are not inappropriately included in  
the IV's. My initial suggestion of coxme may be overkill.
David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT
#
Is there any right censoring?

If not, then plain old lme, lmer, gam (in mgcv), ... etc. would seem
to me do just fine for time to waking = ORIENTATION as a response --
or are you thinking of this as interval-censored data, which it would
appear to be since you've binned the response?  I strongly suspect
that the simpler approach would work pretty well, anyway, but ...

For FULLY ORIENTED, which is binary, glmm, glmer, etc. would seem to
do if there's no censoring.

I'd be happy doing this even for a "small" amount of right censoring
(uh-oh) and the usual hack cheats --replacing the censoring time with
something slightly bigger than the censoring time, for example. But
here I'd be getting by knuckles slapped -- whack whack! -- for
statistical hackery, probably justifiably, so you probably need to
retreat to the original approach if that's the case.

I would welcome criticism/correction on this suggestion if I'm all wet
-- or even just damp.

Cheers,
Bert
On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 7:32 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net> wrote:

  
    
#
There is indeed right censoring, but I obviously didn't explain it very well. 

Patients are either fully oriented or not (1 or 2) after an hour. If they're
not, then the data is right censored.

However, I don't feel that "coxme" is overkill at all, as I may also have to
account for repeated COURSES of treatments on the same individiual, so the
data would be  structured as follows: TREATMENTS repeated within COURSES
repeated within PATIENTS.

However, I may need a little help later specifying the model technically in
R.

What would the random effects bit of the formula look like? At   the moment
I have

mycoxme<-coxme(mysurv~SEX + (1|MRN))

for example.

would a correct specification for the nested data be:

mycoxme<-coxme(mysurv~SEX + (1|MRN|COURSE))

Then of course we have the added issue that treatments are ordered.... so is
there a "Frailty" model that can account for that I wonder? 


Thanks for all your help.

Ross

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