Elsevier

The Lancet

Volume 359, Issue 9314, 13 April 2002, Pages 1309-1310
The Lancet

Research Letters
Quantification of the completeness of follow-up

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(02)08272-7Get rights and content

Summary

Completeness of follow-up is important, especially in clinical trials, since unequal follow-up in the treatment groups can bias the analysis of results. In survival studies, information on participants who do not complete the study is often omitted because their data can be included up to the time at which they were lost to follow-up. We propose a simple measure of completeness that is the ratio of the total observed persontime and the potential person-time of follow-up in a study. Our measure is easy to calculate, can be illustrated pictorially, and can be used to identify subgroups with especially poor follow-up.

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