Dictionary
The Dictionary provides concise definitions of health economics terms, arranged alphabetically for quick reference. Use it to understand unfamiliar terminology or confirm the meaning of a specific term.
A
- Administrative CensoringEnd-of-Study Censoring, Administrative Right Censoring
- A form of right censoring occurring because a study reaches its planned end date before every participant has experienced the event of interest.
C
- Cause-Specific SurvivalDisease-Specific Survival, Net Survival
- The probability of surviving without dying from a specific cause of interest, treating deaths from other causes as censoring rather than a competing risk.
- CensoringCensored Data, Censored Observation
- Censoring occurs in time-to-event data when an individual's event time is not observed exactly but is known only to lie beyond, before, or within a recorded time boundary.
D
- Dependent CensoringNon-Ignorable Censoring, Correlated Censoring
- A survival analysis situation in which the reason for censoring is related to a participant's underlying risk of the event, violating standard assumptions.
E
- Event-Free SurvivalEFS
- Event-free survival is the time from a specified starting point to the first event in a prespecified endpoint, with incomplete event-free follow-up handled according to the study's censoring rules.
I
- Independent CensoringNon-Informative Censoring Type, Random Censoring
- An assumption that, within the information used for a survival analysis, censoring does not convey additional information about a person’s unobserved event time.
- Informative CensoringNon-Random Censoring, Outcome-Dependent Censoring
- A form of censoring in which the reason observation ends is related to a participant's underlying risk, violating standard survival analysis assumptions.
- Interval CensoringInterval-Censored Data, Between-Visit Censoring
- A form of censoring in which an event's exact time is unknown but known to fall within a specific interval, such as between visits.
L
- Left Censoring
- A form of censoring in which an event is known to have occurred before an observed time, but its exact prior timing is unknown.
- Life Table MethodActuarial Method, Life-Table Method
- A survival technique dividing follow-up into fixed intervals and calculating the proportion of at-risk patients surviving each, accounting for censoring.
- Log-Rank TestMantel-Cox Test, Mantel-Haenszel Survival Test
- The log-rank test is a nonparametric hypothesis test that compares the event-time distributions of two or more groups by accumulating observed-minus-expected events across distinct event times while accounting for right censoring.
N
- Non-Informative CensoringIgnorable Censoring, Non-Informative Dropout
- A form of censoring in which its timing provides no information about a participant's underlying risk, satisfying the assumption standard survival methods require.
R
- Right CensoringRight-Censored Data, Type I Censoring
- The most common form of censoring, occurring when follow-up ends or a patient is lost before the event of interest has occurred.