We Need Subject Matter Expertise to Choose and Identify Causal Estimands: Comment on “Estimands for Recurrent Event Endpoints in the Presence of a Terminal Event”

Abstract

We summarize what we consider to be the two main limitations of the “Estimands for Recurrent Event Endpoints in the Presence of a Terminal Event” (Schmidli et al. 2022). First, the authors did not give detailed guidance on how to choose an appropriate estimand in light of subject-matter considerations. Reasoning about the mechanism by which treatment affects different types of events is central when selecting a causal estimand, and such reasoning can be grounded in the interventionist mediation literature. Second, the article also did not discuss the crucial task of identification when the aim is to study a causal question. Thereby, the authors omit important differences in the uncertainty of the assumptions needed to target each estimand by particular statistical methods. These assumptions have crucial implications for the confidence that can be placed in a given effect estimate, and for the planning and collection of relevant variables in the study design.