Competing risk: An illustration with aspiration pneumonia in head and neck cancer patients undergoing radical radiotherapy: A biostatistician’s perspective.

ABSTRACT

Interest in survival analysis is to look and capture the information about the occurrence of events, i.e., death. In human life different types of events may happen at the same time. Sometimes, few events completely interrupt or make subtle changes on the occurrence of an event of interest. The method to capture information about the specific event of interest along with other events is known as competing risk modeling. This paper is dedicated to explore the application of competing risk model in oncology practice. It is aimed in near future that more and more survival analysis will be performed through application of competing risk modeling instead of traditional survival analysis to generate robust statistical inference.