Case-control methods in the presence of multiple failure times and competing risks

The link between cohort and incident case-control studies has been considered by many authors. In particular, under the Cox proportional hazards model, follow-up data (implicit or explicit) can be analyzed as a case-control study by randomly selecting controls from the risk sets of each incident case, thereby obviating the necessity of working with the entire cohort when interest is primarily on exposure effects. This paper extends this linkage to competing risks and to diseases with multiple incidence or recurrence times by matching to each event (case) a sample of controls from the appropriate risk set. Illustrations are given.