"Clinical Stability" and Propensity Score Matching in Cardiac Surgery: is the clinical evaluation of treatment efficacy algorithm-dependent in small sample size settings?

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Bottigliengo D., Acar A., Sciannameo V., Lorenzoni G., Bejko J., Bottio T., ...More

EPIDEMIOLOGY BIOSTATISTICS AND PUBLIC HEALTH, vol.16, no.1, 2019 (ESCI)

• Publication Type: Article / Article
• Volume: 16 Issue: 1
• Publication Date: 2019
• Doi Number: 10.2427/13001
• Journal Name: EPIDEMIOLOGY BIOSTATISTICS AND PUBLIC HEALTH
• Journal Indexes: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus
• Hacettepe University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

Background: Propensity score matching represents one of the most popular techniques to deal with treatment allocation bias in observational studies. However, when the number of enrolled patients is very low, the creation of matched set of subjects may highly depend on the model used to estimate individual propensity scores, undermining the stability of consequential clinical findings. In this study, we investigate the potential issues related to the stability of the matched sets created by different propensity score models and we propose some diagnostic tools to evaluate them.