{"doi":"10.1002/sim.70131","title":"Exploring Causal Effects of Hormone‐ and Radio‐Treatments in an Observational Study of Breast Cancer Using Copula‐Based Semi‐Competing Risks Models","abstract":"Breast cancer patients may experience relapse or death after surgery during the follow-up period, leading to dependent censoring of relapse. This phenomenon, known as semi-competing risk, imposes challenges in analyzing treatment effects on breast cancer and necessitates advanced statistical tools for unbiased analysis. Despite progress in estimation and inference within semi-competing risks regression, its application to causal inference is still in its early stages. This article aims to propose a frequentist and semi-parametric framework based on copula models that can facilitate valid causal inference, net quantity estimation and interpretation, and sensitivity analysis for unmeasured factors under right-censored semi-competing risks data. We also propose novel procedures to enhance parameter estimation and its applicability in practice. After that, we apply the proposed framework to a breast cancer study and detect the time-varying causal effects of hormone- and radio-treatments on patients' relapse and overall survival. Moreover, extensive numerical evaluations demonstrate the method's feasibility, highlighting minimal estimation bias and reliable statistical inference.","journal":"Statistics in Medicine","year":2025,"id":544604,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9498,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1434726,"name":"Mengjiao Peng","orcid":"0009-0003-4725-514X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":717862,"name":"Yifan Cui","orcid":"0000-0002-9957-7955","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1434727,"name":"Elynn Chen","orcid":"0000-0002-7599-1828","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":405300,"name":"Chixiang Chen","orcid":"0000-0001-5474-2833","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1434725,"name":"Tonghui Yu","orcid":"0000-0002-9271-2819","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":63,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:53:12.864581Z","pmid":"40462407","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}