Fatores que influenciam na proporção de indivíduos imunes as reações hansênicas em pacientes diagnosticados com hanseníase no RN.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is using survival models with cure fraction to identify factors that influence the immunity to leprosy reactions in patients with leprosy patients. The data refer to a retrospective study conducted at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (IMT) of UFRN, between the years 2010 and 2013, which were collected the medical records of 263 patients diagnosed with leprosy in Rio Grande do Norte. For each patient was recorded the time (in months) between the diagnosis of the disease until the first leprosy reaction. Considering that for some individuals this reaction will not happen, it was considered the study and adjust regression models for survival data that allow the occurrence of immune individuals. Thus, the Weibull promotion time model was used to study the association between reaction time and many factors related to the characteristics of individuals and ratings on the stage of the disease. To adjust this model to data obtained maximum likelihood estimators and applied hypothesis tests associated with the parameters of this model. The flexcure package (Silva, 2015) of the R software was used to obtain the tuning results. As a result, for each group of combinations of statistically significant factors in the model, the estimated fraction of the immune event of interest.