Is it too early to investigate survival outcomes of the new US heart allocation system?

We read with interest the recent article by Cogswell et al.1 on the new heart allocation system, which concluded that post-transplant survival had significantly decreased after implementation. We have concerns about the validity of this analysis. Specifically, it appears that the authors have overlooked the important non-informative censoring assumption of the Kaplan-Meier estimator.2 This is more serious than the admitted limitation of wide confidence intervals around the estimates secondary to small sample size.
Source: The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation - Category: Transplant Surgery Authors: Tags: Case Anecdotes, Comments and Opinions Source Type: research