First a statistical issue: The survfit routine will produce predicted survival curves for any requested combination of the covariates in the original model. This is not the same thing as an "adjusted" survival curve. Confusion on this is prevalent, however. True adjustment requires a population average over the confounding factors and is closely related to the standardized incidence ratio concept found in epidemiology.

To answer your technical question:
   fit <- coxph(Surv(.........
   mysurv <- survfit(fit, newdata= mydata)
This will give a set of predicted curves, one for each observation in mydata. If we assume 2 treatments and 4 ethnicities, this means that there are 8 possible predicted curves. You can certainly take the curves for "trt=1, white" and "trt=2, white", plot them together on one graph, and call this your "adjusted" survival curves; the mydata data set would have two observations. This is not a correct label but is certainly common.

Terry Therneau

On 11/26/2012 05:00 AM, r-help-requ...@r-project.org wrote:
Dear R-users
I am trying to make an adjusted Kaplan-Meier curve (using the Survival package) 
but I am having difficulty with
plotting it so that the plot only shows the curves for the adjusted results.
My data come from a randomised controlled trial, and I would like the adjusted 
Kaplan-Meier
curve to only show two curves for the adjusted survival: one for those on 
treatment (Treatment==1)
and another curve for those on placebo (Treatment==0).

My problem is that when I plot the survfit of my coxph, I think it displays a 
curve for
every single individual factor in my coxph, whereas I would like it to only 
display the
adjusted curves for when Treatment==1 and Treatment==0.  How can I do this?

A simplified example of my code with only one effect-modifier is:

simple.cox.ethnicity<- coxph(Surv(whenfailed,failed) ~ factor(Treatment) + 
factor(ethnicity)) #I've my data are attached already
survfit.simple.cox.ethnicity<- survfit(simple.cox.ethnicity,survmat) #survmat 
is a data.frame that contains Treatment and ethnicity
plot(survfit.simple.cox.ethnicity, col=c("red","black"), main="survfit.simple.cox", 
xlab="survival time", ylab="propotion surviving")

Thank you so much for your help.
Yours gratefully,
Brent Caldwell

______________________________________________
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.

Reply via email to