How to calculate a life table for different baseline groups (Cox survival analysis)

Question

I wish to recreate a table from a study (DOI: 10.1097/MAO.0000000000001914). The study includes survival analyses on whether or not patients loose their hearing. Hearing is described using two outcomes: pure-tone average hearing threshold (PTA) in decibels and a standardized word-recognition score (WRS) in % recognized correctly. For hearing loss, cut-off values are used to create a binary variable of "serviceable hearing." Hearing at baseline, however, differs, creating a potential selection bias. To account for this bias, this table is created. This table is described as using Cox predicted rates of loss of serviceable hearing, based on baseline hearing rates. It's looks like this:

My question is: how can I recreate this? Do you select a subgroup of patients that have this specific baseline (e.g. select all patients with a baseline PTA of <10 and a WRS between 90-100%, and consequently create a life table? ? I imagine there will be a lot of small groups (25!). Or is there any other technique, that is able to use more and potentially all your data for each estimation?

I work in R and use survfit and surv_summary to create the life tables.

Answer 1

In the cited paper,* the plots in Figure 3 and figure 4 indicate that the authors used baseline values of both WRS and PTA as continuous predictors. Such modeling of continuous predictors without binning into groups is generally the best preactice. Those plots are for single-predictor associations with outcome, with some type of flexible fit (perhaps restricted cubic splines; the authors didn't specify that detail in the methods).

Table 3 shows the associations of those predictors with outcome together in a two-predictor model, which they say was "developed using forward and backward selection." As they only show a single hazard ratio (HR) for each of PTA (2.07 per 10-dB change; 95% CI, 1.64–2.61) and WRS (1.48 per 10 percentage-point change; 95% CI, 1.27–1.72), it seems that non-linear terms were removed in the process and that interactions between WRS and PTA were either not considered or were found not to improve upon the model.

What's important with respect to your question is that there was no breakdown into subgroups. All data values for all participants went into constructing the model summarized in Table 3. Then that model was used to make predictions of outcomes for different hypothesized combinations of PTA and WRS. The predictions (with confidence intervals) are displayed in the table you show (Table 4 of the paper).

To reproduce the table you would need access to the original data. The HR values are relative to a baseline hazard, which is estimated from the data. The principles are quite straightforward and represent a standard use of Cox modeling for prediction, not just for description. In R, after using coxph() to build the model, the predict() function applied to the model along with sets of predictor values would give you these predicted probabilities of maintaining serviceable hearing.

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*JB Hunter et al, "Hearing Outcomes in Conservatively Managed Vestibular Schwannoma Patients With Serviceable Hearing," Otology & Neurotology 39:e704–e711, 2018.