Prostate cancer: net survival and cause-specific survival rates after multiple imputation

BACKGROUND: Estimations of survival rates are diverse and the choice of the appropriate method depends on the context. Given the increasing interest in multiple imputation methods, we explored the interest of a multiple imputation approach in the estimation of cause-specific survival, when a subset of causes of death was observed. METHODS: By using European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC), 20 multiply imputed datasets were created and analyzed with a Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equation (MICE) algorithm. Then, cause-specific survival was estimated on each dataset with two methods: Kaplan-Meier and competing risks. The two pooled cause-specific survival and confidence intervals were obtained using Rubin’s rules after complementary log-log transformation. Net survival was estimated using Pohar-Perme’s estimator and was compared to pooled cause-specific survival. Finally, a sensitivity analysis was performed to test the robustness of our constructed multiple imputation model. RESULTS: Cause-specific survival performed better than net survival, since this latter exceeded 100 % for almost the first 2 years of follow-up and after 9 years whereas the cause-specific survival decreased slowly and than stabilized at around 94 % at 9 years. Sensibility study results were satisfactory. CONCLUSIONS: On our basis of prostate cancer data, the results obtained by cause-specific survival after multiple imputation appeared to be better and more realistic than those obtained using net survival. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0048-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.