A comparison of ad hoc methods to account for non-cancer AIDS and deaths as competing risks when estimating the effect of HAART on incident cancer AIDS among HIV-infected men

When competing risks are independent of the event of interest, only method 1 produced unbiased estimates of the marginal HR, although independence cannot be verified from the data. When competing risks are dependent, method 1 generally produced the least-biased estimates of the marginal HR for the scenarios explored; however, alternative methods may be preferred.