A Causal Mediation Approach to Account for Interaction of Treatment and Intercurrent Events: Using Hypothetical Strategy

Hypothetical strategy is a common strategy for handling intercurrent events (IEs). No current guideline or study considers treatment-IE interaction to target the estimand in any one IE-handling strategy. Based on the hypothetical strategy, we aimed to (1) assess the performance of three estimators with different considerations for the treatment-IE interaction in a simulation and (2) compare the estimation of these estimators in a real trial. Simulation data were generalized based on realistic clinical trials of Alzheimer's disease. The estimand of interest was the effect of treatment with no IE occurring under the hypothetical strategy. Three estimators, namely, G-estimation with and without interaction and IE-ignored estimation, were compared in scenarios where the treatment-IE interaction effect was set as -50% to 50% of the main effect. Bias was the key performance measure. The real case was derived from a randomized trial of methadone maintenance treatment. Only G-estimation with interaction exhibited unbiased estimations regardless of the existence, direction or magnitude of the treatment-IE interaction in those scenarios. Neglecting the interaction and ignoring the IE would introduce a bias as large as 0.093 and 0.241 (true value, -1.561) if the interaction effect existed. In the real case, compared with G-estimation with interaction, G-estimation without interaction and IE-ignored estimation increased the estimand of interest by 33.55% and 34.36%, respectively. This study highlights the importance of considering treatment-IE interaction in the estimand framework. In practice, it would be better to include the interaction in the estimator by default.