Regression analysis of doubly censored failure time data with applications to AIDS studies.

In many epidemiological studies, the survival time of interest is the elapsed time between two related events, the originating event and the failure event, and the times of the occurrences of both events are right or interval censored. We discuss the regression analysis of such studies and a simple estimating equation approach is proposed under the proportional hazards model. The method can easily be implemented and does not involve any iteration among unknown parameters, as full likelihood approaches proposed in the literature do. The asymptotic properties of the proposed regression coefficient estimates are derived and an AIDS cohort study is analyzed to illustrate the proposed approach.