[Clinical research XXII. From clinical judgment to Cox proportional hazards model]

Survival analyses are commonly used to determine the time of an event (for example, death). However, they can be used also for other clinical outcomes on the condition that these are dichotomous, for example healing time. These analyses only consider the relationship of one variable. However, Cox proportional hazards model is a multivariate analysis of the survival analysis, in which other potentially confounding covariates of the effect of the main maneuver studied, such as age, gender or disease stage, are taken into account. This analysis can include both quantitative and qualitative variables in the model. The measure of association used is called hazard ratio (HR) or relative risk ratio, which is not the same as the relative risk or odds ratio (OR). The difference is that the HR refers to the possibility that one of the groups develops the event before it is compared with the other group. The proportional hazards multivariate model of Cox is the most widely used in medicine when the phenomenon is studied in two dimensions: time and event.