Yan Ying, Shen Lingzhu
School of Mathematics, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada.
Biom J. 2025 Feb;67(1):e70035. doi: 10.1002/bimj.70035.
Causal mediation analysis is a useful tool to examine how an exposure variable causally affects an outcome variable through an intermediate variable. In recent years, there is increasing research interest in mediation analysis with survival data. The existing literature usually requires accurate measurements of the mediator and the confounders, which is infeasible in many biomedical and social science studies. Ignoring measurement errors may lead to misleading inference results. Furthermore, the current identification results of causal effects under the additive hazards model are limited to the scenario with no exposure-mediator interaction, which can be unappealing in mediation analysis. In this paper, we derive the identification results of direct and indirect effects under the additive hazards model in the presence of exposure-mediator interaction. Furthermore, we propose a corrected approach to adjust for the impact of measurement error in the mediator and the confounders and obtain consistent estimations of the direct and indirect effects. The performance of the proposed method is studied in simulation studies and a real data study.
因果中介分析是一种有用的工具,用于检验暴露变量如何通过中间变量对结果变量产生因果影响。近年来,对生存数据进行中介分析的研究兴趣日益浓厚。现有文献通常要求对中介变量和混杂因素进行准确测量,而这在许多生物医学和社会科学研究中是不可行的。忽略测量误差可能会导致误导性的推断结果。此外,在相加风险模型下,目前因果效应的识别结果仅限于不存在暴露-中介变量交互作用的情形,而这在中介分析中可能并不理想。在本文中,我们推导了存在暴露-中介变量交互作用时相加风险模型下直接效应和间接效应的识别结果。此外,我们提出了一种校正方法,以调整中介变量和混杂因素测量误差的影响,并获得直接效应和间接效应的一致估计。我们在模拟研究和一项实际数据研究中考察了所提方法的性能。