A treatment‐specific marginal structural Cox model for the effect of treatment discontinuation

Patients taking a prescribed medication often discontinue their treatment; however, this may negatively impact their health outcomes. If doctors had statistical evidence that discontinuing some prescribed medication shortened, on average, the time to a clinical event (e.g., death), they could use that knowledge to encourage their patients to stay on the prescribed treatment. We describe a treatment‐specific marginal structural Cox model for estimation of the causal effect of treatment discontinuation on a survival endpoint. The effect of treatment discontinuation is quantified by the hazard ratio of the event hazard rate had the population followed the regime “take treatment [Formula: see text] until it is discontinued at some time [Formula: see text] ,” versus the event hazard rate had the population never discontinued treatment [Formula: see text]. Valid causal analysis requires control for treatment confounding, regime confounding, and censoring due to regime violation. We propose new inverse probability of regime compliance weights to address the three issues simultaneously. We apply the framework to data from the Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD–Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD‐AF) study. Patients from this study are treated with one of two types of oral anticoagulants (OACs). We test whether the causal effect of treatment discontinuation differs by type of OAC, and we also estimate the size and direction of the effect. We find evidence that OAC discontinuation increases the hazard for certain events, but we do not find evidence that this effect differs by treatment.