An Overview of Time-to-Event Analysis in Dental Research

Time-to-event (survival) analysis is an integral tool in the wheelhouse of the dental researcher. While there are many references available for the study of time-to-event analysis, they tend to be written for audiences trained in statistical methodology. Moreover, the canonical examples offered by most time-to-event analysis references are focused on outcomes that do not translate directly to dentistry. This article provides a tutorial of time-to-event analysis for the specific context of dental research. Our tutorial assumes no statistical training or computing experience. Using real data from a dental study as our extended example, we explain foundational concepts, including median survival, Nth-year survival, the log-rank test, and the Cox model.