Survival Analysis of Cardiovascular Diseases Yuanxin Hu Washington University in St.

Louis

by Yuanxin Hu

A thesis presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial
fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Introduction

The author of this study have clearly defined Cardiovascular disease (CVD) which refers to a class of
diseases related to the heart or blood vessels that usually leads in the cause of death worldwide and
Many risk factors were found to be associated with it, and as family history, gender, age, et.al. in
addition to that is the effort has been paid to identify them and to evaluate their effects on the onset or
progression of the diseases, and had a prediction of onset/development of the diseases can be made,
and preventive solutions can be applied into the survival analysis of cardiovascular diseases comes from
relatively collected populations followed over short time, and the findings may not easily be generalized
to the patients. The author also stressed that current data set is one subset of data collected by The
Framingham Heart Study since 1948, which recorded 5209 subjects originally likewise current data
includes 4434 randomly selected subjects living in the community of Framingham.

The author of this study also included a discreet explanation on the analysis process on the proportional
assumption or time dependence for individual factors which were tested, variables selected. Each model
and their intersections were considered optimized due to impact of gender. He also specified all the
factors that cause risks to an individual with cardiovascular disease in full details. In addition to this, the
author carefully chosen certain word/s that are simple and easily understood by the readers including
students and future researchers that may do the same study.

Methodology

Since the study is focused on the survival analysis of individuals with cardiovascular diseases. The
descriptive design of research was utilized in the conduct of the research to quantify the survival rates of
people who have cardiovascular disease. Another is to have a full statistical evidence on the assumption,
Survival Data was then gathered through the use of the follow statistical tools to attest its consistencies
on the assumptions of the author; 1) Kaplan-Meier Method, 2) Cox Proportional Hazards Model, 3)
Accelerated Failure Time Model, Tests for Significance 19 Methods and Procedures SAS Procedures 20
Results Data exploration, Model Selection, Validation of Assumption of Proportionality, Model
Optimization, Model Diagnostics, Comparison of Survival Functions and Parametric model to assure the
consistency of the result. Statistical package is applied for the current data analysis. In SAS, Proc
LIFETEST, LIFEREG and PHREG are three major procedures for survival analysis. In general, Proc LIFETEST
is used to compute nonparametric estimates of the survival function by Kaplan-Meier method
Discussion

To test how good the results fit the model with the predictors overall, proper diagnostics was then
performed by measuring the deviance residual plots found by the author of this research. Upon usage of
the SAS, the option Resdev is then applied for the needed measurements. On the other hand, the plots
for the all linear predictors or individual predictor show that the majority of the residuals are converged
around the baseline. The distribution was almost evenly over their respective ranges than certainly,
outliers observed in the plots, but overall, the fitting is good.

For survival analysis using the SAS statistical package, it features the hazard rate for discrete time the
hazard rate becomes a probability that an individual will experience an event at time point t.
furthermore, the hazard rate can just be the estimated, and unobserved rate. That can be more
constant or vary with time.