A competing risks model to estimate the risk of graft failure and patient death after kidney transplantation using continuous donor-recipient age combinations

Abstract

Graft failure and recipient death with functioning graft are important competing outcomes after kidney transplantation. Risk prediction models typically censor for the competing outcome thereby overestimating the cumulative incidence. The magnitude of this overestimation is not well described in real-world transplant data. This retrospective cohort study analyzed data from the European Collaborative Transplant Study (n = 125 250) and from the American Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (n = 190 258). Separate cause-specific hazard models using donor and recipient age as continuous predictors were developed for graft failure and recipient death. The hazard of graft failure increased quadratically with increasing donor age and decreased decaying with increasing recipient age. The hazard of recipient death increased linearly with increasing donor and recipient age. The cumulative incidence overestimation due to competing risk-censoring was largest in high-risk populations for both outcomes (old donors/recipients), sometimes amounting to 8.4 and 18.8 percentage points for graft failure and recipient death, respectively. In our illustrative model for posttransplant risk prediction, the absolute risk of graft failure and death is overestimated when censoring for the competing event, mainly in older donors and recipients. Prediction models for absolute risks should treat graft failure and death as events.