Accommodating informative dropout and death: a joint modelling approach for longitudinal and semicompeting risks data

Abstract

Both dropout and death can truncate observation of a longitudinal outcome. Since extrapolation beyond death is often not appropriate, it is desirable to obtain the longitudinal outcome profile of a population given being alive. We propose a new likelihood-based approach to accommodating informative dropout and death by jointly modelling the longitudinal outcome and semicompeting event times of dropout and death, with an important feature that the conditional longitudinal profile of being alive can be conveniently obtained in a closed form. We use proposed methods to estimate different longitudinal profiles of CD4 cell count for patients from the ‘HIV Epidemiology Research Study’.