[R] Reporting Kaplan-Meier / Cox-Proportional Hazard Standard Error, km.coxph.plot, survfit.object

Paul Johnston pcj127 at gmail.com
Mon Feb 20 03:05:45 CET 2012


What is the best way to report the standard error when publishing
Kaplan-Meier plots?  In my field (Vascular Surgery), practitioners
loosely refer to the "10% error" cutoff as the point at which to stop
drawing the KM curve.  I am interpreting this as the *standard error
of the cumulative hazard*, although I'm having a difficult time
finding some guidelines about this (perhaps I am not searching the
correct terms or references).  My KM figures contain typically two
curves that I am comparing using the logrank test.  Inspecting the
?survfit.object yields the std.err field that gives the standard error
for each timepoint on the curve.

Is it recommended that I just name the timepoint at which the standard
error exceeds 0.1 in the figure legend?  For example, "The standard
error exceeds 10% at time points beyond 394 days."  I have seen this
strategy in other publications.

What is your approach?

Thanks for your help,
PCJ



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