Dear UseRs, Suppose I have data regarding smoking habits of a prospective cohort and wish to determine the risk ratio of colorectal cancer in the smokers compared to the non-smokers. What do I do at the end of the study with people who die of heart disease? Can I just censor them exactly the same as people who become uncontactable or who die in a plane crash? If not, why not?
I'm thinking that heart disease isn't independent of smoking even though a death from heart disease is probably uninformative about colorectal cancer risk. Hence I suspect simply censoring these deaths will introduce a bias, but I don't know how to correct for it. Many thanks, Geoff Russell -- an interested student ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
