Congratulations to alumna Cara Lwin (MS 2024) on the publication of “Leveraging a Bayesian Approach in a Comparative Effectiveness Trial of Major Adverse Cardiovascular Events” in Clinical Epidemiology on November 7. The peer-reviewed paper was co-authored by professor Robert Alan Greevy Jr., principal application developer Cole Beck, and assistant professor Amber Hackstadt, along with professor of internal medicine and pediatrics Christianne Roumie and resident physician Kathryn Diane Snyder. Dr. Hackstadt is the paper’s corresponding author.
In seeking to better understand the association of sodium–glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) with major adverse cardiovascular events and heart failure (MACE+HF) hospitalization, Lwin and her co-authors demonstrate how investigators can employ Bayesian survival modeling in analyzing patient outcomes. In their words: “The Bayesian approach allows one to make probability statements about clinically meaningful effects in cardiovascular studies as opposed to simply stating whether a statistically significant effect was found. The probability of a meaningful effect is a more useful statistic for clinical decision-making than a p-value or even a confidence interval.” The study addresses interpretation concerns raised by an earlier paper (Richardson et al., Annals of Internal Medicine 2023) whose co-authors included Dr. Hackstadt, Dr. Greevy, Dr. Roumie, and staff biostatistician Alese Halvorson (MS 2019; now senior statistician at AstraZeneca).
Lwin graduated from University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology (minoring in chemistry, computer science, neuroscience, and economics), and joined the staff of the Department of Biostatistics in 2022 as an associate biostatistician. As a member of the Vanderbilt Biostatistics Data Coordinating Center‘s Design & Analysis Unit, her publications include “Severity of Respiratory Syncytial Virus vs COVID-19 and Influenza Among Hospitalized US Adults” (JAMA Network Open 2024), two sets of estimates in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report as a member of the CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Collaborators research group, and “Chemotherapy-Surgery Interval Effects on Tumor Necrosis and Outcome in Children and Young Adults With Osteosarcoma” (Pediatric Blood & Cancer 2024).