Abdus Sattar

Objective.Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease with increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and depression. Although depression may contribute to CVD risk in population-based studies, its influence on cardiovascular morbidity in SLE has not been evaluated. We evaluated the association between depression and vascular disease in SLE.Methods.A cross-sectional study was conducted from 2002–2005 in 161 women with SLE and without CVD. The primary outcome measure was a composite vascular disease marker consisting of the presence of coronary artery calcium and/or carotid artery plaque.Results.In total, 101 women met criteria for vascular disease. In unadjusted analyses, several traditional cardiovascular risk factors, inflammatory markers, adiposity, SLE disease-related factors, and depression were associated with vascular disease. In the final multivariable model, the psychological variable depression was associated with nearly 4-fold...

The joint modelling of longitudinal and survival data has received remarkable attention in the methodological literature over the past decade; however, the availability of software to implement the methods lags behind. The most common form of joint model assumes that the association between the survival and longitudinal processes are underlined by shared random effects. As a result, computationally intensive numerical integration techniques such as adaptive Gauss-Hermite quadrature are required to evaluate the likelihood. We describe a new user written command, stjm, which allows the user to jointly model a continuous longitudinal response and the time to an event of interest. We assume a linear mixed effects model for the longitudinal submodel, allowing flexibility through the use of fixed and/or random fractional polynomials of time. Four choices are available for the survival submodel; namely the exponential, Weibull or Gompertz proportional hazard models, and the flexible parame...