Pairwise multiple comparison adjustment in survival analysis.

Many clinical studies have as their endpoint the time until some event (such as death) occurs. Often in such studies researchers are interested in comparing several treatment or prognostic groups with one another in terms of their survival curves. When many such pairwise group comparisons are done, the chance of finding a false significance among all of the comparisons is inflated above the usual desired significance level. This paper investigates methods of adjusting the survival analysis for the number of comparisons being made. These methods are applied to a retrospective study conducted by the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry and compared in a simulation study in terms of the power to detect actual differences in the survival curves between the groups. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd