How do you call an outcome if you have multiple endpoints to investigate it?
Hello,
When you want to investigate exacerbations (outcome of interest) in asthma, you can measure:
1) the incidence rate in the last year (i.e. mean numbers of exacerbations in the last year in your total population);
2) the frequency of patients reporting one exacerbation in the last year;
3) the time-to-1st-exacerbation within the last year.
So you have 3 different endpoints to explore the same outcome.
Could you please help me in finding the technical term to define this property of the outcome? E.g. Multiple outcome, multivariate outcome, multi-faceted, multivalent, manifold...
Thank you!
Matteo
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5 Answers
Akhilesh Kumar
Hi
The technical term for the same is called 'composite outcome' and while using them in any study, adequately addressing all composite outcomes reasonably will increase the statistical efficiency.
The technical term for the same is called 'composite outcome' and while using them in any study, adequately addressing all composite outcomes reasonably will increase the statistical efficiency.
Babak Khoshnood
I don't quite agree with some of the answers below - they are a bit vague and could be wrong.
The most common type of composite outcome is for example survival without dementia (i.e, survival + absence of dementia). What you have seems to me more like different ways of characterizing / measuring the health outcomes related to asthma. In other words, you have different outcome measures and not really composite outcomes in the sense most commonly used in epidemiology. Which one of those outcome measures is the best one depends mostly on substative knowledge of asthma but also the type of data that have been collected.
The most common type of composite outcome is for example survival without dementia (i.e, survival + absence of dementia). What you have seems to me more like different ways of characterizing / measuring the health outcomes related to asthma. In other words, you have different outcome measures and not really composite outcomes in the sense most commonly used in epidemiology. Which one of those outcome measures is the best one depends mostly on substative knowledge of asthma but also the type of data that have been collected.
Oleksii Korzh