GRADE Guidelines: 29. Rating the certainty in time-to-event outcomes—Study limitations due to censoring of participants with missing data in intervention studies

Objectives: To provide Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) guidance for the consideration of study limitations (risk of bias) due to missing participant outcome data for time-to-event outcomes in intervention studies. Study Design and Setting: We developed this guidance through an iterative process that included membership consultation, feedback, presentation, and iterative discussion at meetings of the GRADE working group. Results: The GRADE working group has published guidance on how to account for missing participant outcome data in binary and continuous outcomes. When analyzing time-to-event outcomes (e.g., overall survival and time-to-treatment failure) data of participants for whom the outcome of interest (e.g., death and relapse) has not been observed are dealt with through censoring. To do so, standard methods require that censored individuals are representative for those remaining in the study. Two types of censoring can be distinguished...