Extension of Competing Risks Model and Its Application to the Analysis of Two Negatively Correlated Events in a Kidney Disease Study

When subjects may fail from several distinct causes but the occurrence of failure from one precludes the others, it is referred competing risks. While both event of interest and competing event types are unfavorable in many typical settings, there are some cases in which a favorable event and unfavorable event types are competing. We extend an application of competing risks model to a case in IgA nephropathy, in which two types of events were negatively created but not satisfy the condition of competing risks. Each event type does not necessarily preclude the other type of event and the exact order of time to events was often unclear due to irregular censoring intervals. We discuss interpretation of the result and generalization of our extension.