Treatment comparison in randomized clinical trials with nonignorable missingness: A reverse regression approach

A common problem in randomized clinical trials is nonignorable missingness, namely that the clinical outcome(s) of interest can be missing in a way that is not fully explained by the observed quantities. This happens when the continued participation of patients depends on the current outcome after adjusting for the observed history. Standard methods for handling nonignorable missingness typically require specification of the response mechanism, which can be difficult in practice. This article proposes a reverse regression approach that does not require a model for the response mechanism. Instead, the proposed approach relies on the assumption that missingness is independent of treatment assignment upon conditioning on the relevant outcome(s). This conditional independence assumption is motivated by the observation that, when patients are effectively masked to the assigned treatment, their decision to either stay in the trial or drop out cannot depend on the assigned treatment directly. Under this assumption, one can estimate parameters in the reverse regression model, test for the presence of a treatment effect, and in some cases estimate the outcome distributions. The methodology can be extended to longitudinal outcomes under natural conditions. The proposed approach is illustrated with real data from a cardiovascular study.