Analysis of survival data from case-control family studies

In case-control family studies with survival endpoint, age of onset of diseases can be used to assess the familial aggregation of the disease and the relationship between the disease and genetic or environmental risk factors. Because of the retrospective nature of the case-control study, methods for analyzing prospectively collected correlated failure time data do not apply directly. In this article, we propose a semi-parametric quasi-partial-likelihood approach to simultaneously estimate the effect of covariates on the age of onset and the association of ages of onset among family members that does not require specification of the baseline marginal distribution. We conducted a simulation study to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach and compare it with the existing semi-parametric ones. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach has better performance in terms of consistency and efficiency. We illustrate the methodology using a subset of data from the Washington Ashkenazi Study.