BookmarkSubscribeRSS Feed
Nusseey
Calcite | Level 5

I am working on a longitudinal project with an enormous dataset (over 1.5 million participants). I am looking at their survival based on several factors including some measure of disease and age. I have been able to plot KM curves through proc lifetest, and adjusted KM curves using the baseline statement in proc phreg. The investigator I am working for, however, does not feel that Kaplan Meier curves or hazard rates are intuitive from a clinician point of view. He said that clinicians expect to see a "Restricted Mean Survival Time Curve." RMST is defined as the area under the survival curve up to a point t*.

 

I have attached an example of the type of result I am looking for to this post. I have been unable to find anything regarding how to generate such a curve. If you notice, instead of survival probability on the Y-axis, it is Mean Survival Time, and on the X-axis it is age rather than time. For each of my participants, I have starting age, degree of disease (a categorical variable with 5 levels), and date of death/age at death. I have seen many items regarding calculating a RMST at a point in time, but I have not seen anything about generating this type of curve in SAS. Any guidance would be much appreciated.

 

Thank you

 

 

2 REPLIES 2
Reeza
Super User

@Nusseey wrote:

. The investigator I am working for, however, does not feel that Kaplan Meier curves or hazard rates are intuitive from a clinician point of view. He said that clinicians expect to see a "Restricted Mean Survival Time Curve." RMST is defined as the area under the survival curve up to a point t*.

 I haven't been doing survival analysis for the last 5 years, but in the 4 years where that was all I did everyday, with clinicians side by side, I never once generated the plot shown and we always used survival curves and hazard rates. 

 

Search the literature for your field and see what's actually being done. But I'm the person that pushes back on reviewers as well when they ask for stupid things...which did seem to surprise several of my colleagues. The reviewers did accept the article without the changes as well 😉

 

 

BrianGaines
SAS Employee

@Nusseey,

 

It may be too late, but I wanted to let you know that the new release of SAS/STAT 15.1 includes new RMST functionality for survival analysis. 

 

There is a new RMSTREG procedure that analyzes time-to-event data by using regression with respect to the RMST.  Also, the LIFETEST procedure was enhanced with the ability to analyze and plot RMST and restricted mean time lost (RMTL).

 

Hopefully this is helpful!

 

-Brian

sas-innovate-2024.png

Join us for SAS Innovate April 16-19 at the Aria in Las Vegas. Bring the team and save big with our group pricing for a limited time only.

Pre-conference courses and tutorials are filling up fast and are always a sellout. Register today to reserve your seat.

 

Register now!

What is ANOVA?

ANOVA, or Analysis Of Variance, is used to compare the averages or means of two or more populations to better understand how they differ. Watch this tutorial for more.

Find more tutorials on the SAS Users YouTube channel.

Discussion stats
  • 2 replies
  • 2879 views
  • 4 likes
  • 3 in conversation