This course will primarily introduce participants to rates, usual measures of disease occurrence and exposure effect in longitudinal studies. Survival analysis and cox proportional hazards regression modeling will be the main statistical focus using person-time data. Graphical displays, modeling time-varying covariates, analyzing survival data with competing outcomes will be covered here. A preparatory STATA session will be presented for those who are new to STATA. Emphasis will be placed on effective statistical codes and use of clean and informative programming. STATA will be used to manage, manipulate and analyze person-time data. Interpretation of outputs and producing publication ready results will be covered. Analysis will be based on both randomized clinical trials and cohort studies. Specialized functions such as landmark analysis, stratified cox models and competing risk models will also be included. Concepts regarding multi-state analysis will be presented and tutorials using R will be provided.

By the end of the course students should be able to:

• Perform survival analysis
• Implement STATA do files and codes to perform survival analysis
• Analyze survival data using time-to-first event and multiple events
• Analyze survival data with competing outcomes
• Interpret the results of survival analyses as presented in the published literature

Foundational knowledge of principles and methods in epidemiology and biostatistics are required. Basic understanding and experience of STATA, SAS or R is recommended.

• Kirkwood BR, Sterne JAC, Essential Medical Statistics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science 2003
• An Introduction to Survival Analysis Using Stata, 3rd edition. Mario Cleeves, William Gould, Roberto Gutierrez, Yulia Marchenko. Stata Press 2010
• Survival Analysis and Epidemiological Tables Reference Manual. Stata Press 2011
• Competing Risks: a Practical Perspective. Melania Pintile. Wiley 2006

Bindu Kalesan, PhD, MPH

Dr. Bindu Kalesan is a clinical epidemiologist and a biostatistician and her primary research interest is the field of cardiovascular disease epidemiology with a methodological focus on randomized clinical trials and observational designs. She also works in the field of firearm violence research studying correlates of gun ownership and firearm violence survivorship. Dr. Kalesan was involved in multiple large-scale randomized clinical trials in interventional cardiology and will also be the course instructor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Mailman School. Dr. Kalesan is Associate Director of Epidemiology at pharmaceutical Product Development, NC and Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology, Columbia University, NY and offers and participates in various clinical studies within the departments. She also has substantial experience on mentoring medical students and teaching statistical analysis as well as an established publication record.