Reflection on modern methods: competing risks versus multi-state models

Abstract: Survival competing risks models are very useful for studying the incidence of diseases whose occurrence competes with other possible diseases or health conditions. These models perform properly when working with terminal events, such as death, that imply the conclusion of the corresponding study. But they do not allow the treatment of scenarios with non-terminal competing events that may occur sequentially. Multi-state models are complex survival models. They focus on pathways defined by the temporal and sequential occurrence of numerous events of interest and thus they are suitable for connecting competing non-terminal events as well as to manage other survival scenarios with higher complexity. We discuss competing risks within the framework of multi-state models and clarify the usefulness of both models for analysing epidemiological data. We highlight the power of multi-state models through a real-world study of recurrent hip fracture from Bayesian inferential methodology.