Illustrating implications of misaligned causal questions and statistics in settings with competing events and interest in treatment mechanisms
竞争事件下因果问题与统计方法错位的影响：以治疗机制为关注点
In the presence of competing events, many investigators are interested in a direct treatment effect on the event of interest that does not capture treatment effects on competing events. Classical survival analysis methods that treat competing events like censoring events, at best, target a controlled direct effect: the effect of the treatment under a difficult to imagine and typically clinically irrelevant scenario where competing events are somehow eliminated. A separable…