How to Make People Immortal and Why it is Not a Good Idea: Improving the Causal Analyses of Healthcare Databases
Kresge 502 677 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, United StatesAbstract: The generation of "immortal time" is a frequent blunder in survival analyses for causal inference. Immortal time explains why medical treatments often look suspiciously amazing. After two centuries of warnings, immortal time still plagues causal analyses in medicine, which is fascinating because "immortal time" doesn't exist in the data. Rather, we generate immortal time...