Study variables and data analysis

The outcome variable is time to death from enrolment to the CART program. The survival time is measured as the time period between the date of enrolment and date of death and it is dichotomized as death and censored. The censored cases include the alive patients, defaulters, and transferred-outs. Data were cleaned, coded, and entered into Epi Data version 3.1 and exported to STATA version 14 for analysis. Bivariate analysis was carried out to determine the association between the dependent variable and the explanatory variables. Both Crude hazard ratio (CHR) and adjusted hazard ratio(AHR) together with the corresponding 95% confidence interval and P-value were used to assess the strength of association and statistical significance. The Kaplan Meier survival curve together with the log-rank test was fitted to determine the survival time. Variables which had p-value <0.25 in bivariate analysis were considered as a candidate for multivariable analysis and variables which had p-value <0.05 in multivariable cox regression analysis were considered as statistically significant. The backward stepwise regression method was applied.