Commentary: Weighing up the dead and missing: reflections on inverse-probability weighting and principal stratification to address truncation by death.

摘要

In the present issue of the Journal, Weuve et al1 provide an innovative analysis of the effect of smoking on cognitive decline in an aged population followed during 5 successive waves in the Chicago Health and Aging Project. As the authors describe with a signed directed acyclic graph,2'3 selection bias may distort the relationship between smoking and cognitive decline owing to the effect of both the exposure and the determinants of cognitive decline on attrition in the study.