Journal de biométrie et biostatistique

Attributable Risk Function with Clustered Survival Data

Abstract

Changchun Xie, Xuewen Lu and Janice Pogue

The Attributable Fraction or risk function (ARF) is used to measure the impact of an exposure on occurrence of disease within a population. For any prospective cohort study, risk is likely to be estimated using time to event or survival data. Attributable risk function with right censored survival data has been discussed by Samuelsen and Eide. We propose a natural extension of the ARF to clustered survival data, which are common in medical research. We derive an estimator of the ARF. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of our method and investigate the consequences of ignoring the cluster effect in analysis.