Uncovering survivorship bias in longitudinal mental health surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mark É CzeislerJoshua F WileyCharles A CzeislerShantha M W RajaratnamMark E Howard

Published in: Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences (2021)

Our findings reveal significant survivorship bias among longitudinal survey respondents, indicating that restricting analytic samples to only respondents who provide repeated assessments in longitudinal survey studies could lead to overly optimistic interpretations of mental health trends over time. Cross-sectional or planned missing data designs may provide more accurate estimates of population-level adverse mental health symptom prevalence than longitudinal surveys.

Keyphrases

cross sectional
mental health
mental illness
risk factors
emergency department
genome wide
big data
gene expression
machine learning
young adults
dna methylation
patient reported