Kaplan-Meier Survival, Actuarial Survival, Censoring, and Competing Events—What Is What?

Survival analyses, most commonly Kaplan-Meier curves, are frequently used in the field of cardiovascular medicine to analyze and graphically illustrate the differences in outcomes between 2 or multiple study groups in randomized controlled trials. Whereas Kaplan-Meier curves provide a nice representation of the survival (or the occurrence of other events of interest) of 1 or several groups of patients, they are commonly misused, especially in the setting of interval censoring, actuarial survival, and competing events. Here, we sought to provide the reader with a simple example that clarifies some of these concepts.