Measurement Error for Age of Onset in Prevalent Cohort Studies

Abstract

Prevalent cohort studies involve screening a sample of individuals from a population for disease, recruiting affected individuals, and prospectively following the cohort of individuals to record the occurrence of disease-related complications or death. This design features a response-biased sampling scheme since individuals living a long time with the disease are preferentially sampled, so naive analysis of the time from disease onset to death will over-estimate survival probabilities. Unconditional and conditional analyses of the resulting data can yield consistent estimates of the survival distribution subject to the validity of their respective model assumptions. The time of disease onset is retrospectively reported by sampled individuals, however, this is often associated with measurement error. In this article we present a framework for studying the effect of measurement error in disease onset times in prevalent cohort studies, report on empirical studies of the effect in each framework of analysis, and describe likelihood-based methods to address such a measurement error.