Can I have two separate end-point curves on ONE Kaplan Meier display ?

[Fahim Jafary]

Hi Folks

I'm analysing a dataset in which I'm looking at two outcome events -

1.  death
2.  death or hospitalization for recurrent heart failure (combined outcome)

There are no comparator groups - just one cohort and it's survival experience.

My question is :  can I somehow place the survival curves of both
outcomes on ONE graph instead of two seperate graphs?  And if so, can
someone kindly guide me as to how to do it in SPSS ?

Many thanks

Fahim H. Jafary, MD
Aga Khan University Hospital
Karachi, Pakistan.

[Rick Bello]

Yes you can. Suppose you have 10 patients in your database.  Copy all the
cases and paste them starting at the first empty line so that your data is
duplicated. Create a new categorical variable (call it V1)that will have
one of 2 values : death or deathrehosp.  Set V1 to "death" for the first
10 cases and set V1 to "deathrehosp" for the second 10 cases. Now you need
one status variable indicating whether the event of interest has
occurred.  For the first 10 cases set this to 1 if death has occurred. For
the second 10 cases set it to 1 if death or rehosp has occurred.  Finally
you need a time variable to indicate a time point at which the events
occurred.

Now set up the KM analysis.  Use the time variable for the time; the
status variable for the status; and V1 for the factor.  Under the options
select plot survival.  This will plot a KM curve for each event of
interest on the same graph.

Rick Bello, MD, PhD
Albert Einstein College of Medicine