MINI REVIEW article
Front. Appl. Math. Stat.
Sec. Statistics and Probability
Cause-distinct incidence for resolving confusion in competing risk analysis: A Critical Review
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan
- 2Osaka Daigaku, Suita, Japan
- 3Kyushu Daigaku, Fukuoka, Japan
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An event that hinders or changes the possibility of observing the event of interest is called a competing risk. For instance, clinical studies for those with multimorbidity or critically severe illnesses often require consideration of competing risks, as the occurrence of other events may preclude the primary event of interest. The cause-specific incidence and the Fine-Gray hazard have been widely used and have become the default methods in competing risk analysis. Nevertheless, some clinicians seem to be unable to correctly interpret the results obtained from the competing risk analysis. Recently, the cause-distinct incidence has been introduced to resolve confusion in competing risk analysis, but because this confusion is widespread among biostatisticians, it may take considerable time to resolve. During this time, clinical researchers will keep writing clinical papers with incorrect interpretations. The objective of this paper is to correct the misinterpretations and expedite clarification of these confusions.
Keywords: Cause-distinct incidence, Cause-specific incidence Hazard, competing risk, Kaplan-Meier, subdistribution hazard
Received: 29 Dec 2025; Accepted: 26 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Nakamura, Yamada and Nose. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tsuyoshi Nakamura
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