424841

Treatments comparison in longitudinal clinical trials with informative dropouts

Article

Last updated: 04 May 2025

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Abstract

he main objective of longitudinal clinical trials is to compare the treat- ment effects depending on an outcome variable. Standard techniques can be used when all intended measurements for all subjects are available. Some patients may leave the study prematurely resulting in monotone missing data (dropout). A major problem arises when the probability of dropout is related to the outcome variable, this often reffered to as informative or non- ignorable dropout. Ignoring the missing data in this case leads to biased estimates of treatment effect differences.  This paper proposes and developes the stochastic EM algorithm to obtain valid estimates of treatment compar- isons. The proposed algorithm is a variant of imputation approaches, which are conceptually and practically simple and are commonly used by practi- tioners. Simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the proposed approach and to compare it with three common approaches; the "last value carrying forward" (LVCF) approach, the "all available data" (AAD) approach and the "partial imputation approach" (PI). Simulation results show that the stochastic EM approach provides unbiased treatment comparisons, or at least "less" biased, comparable to the other three approaches. The stochas- tic FM approach, also, can be used to estimate individual treatment effects, not only comparing treatment effects, as the case with other approaches.  

DOI

10.21608/esju.2004.424841

Authors

First Name

Ahmed

Last Name

Gad

MiddleName

M.

Affiliation

Statistics Department, Faculty of Economics & Political Science, Cairo University, EGYPT

Email

ahmed.attay@bue.edu.eg

City

-

Orcid

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Volume

48

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

42996

Issue Date

2004-06-01

Receive Date

2025-04-28

Publish Date

2004-06-01

Page Start

61

Page End

74

Print ISSN

0542-1748

Online ISSN

2786-0086

Link

https://esju.journals.ekb.eg/article_424841.html

Detail API

http://journals.ekb.eg?_action=service&article_code=424841

Order

424,841

Type

Original Article

Type Code

1,914

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

The Egyptian Statistical Journal

Publication Link

https://esju.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Treatments comparison in longitudinal clinical trials with informative dropouts

Details

Type

Article

Created At

04 May 2025