Evidence-appraisal glossary
Cause-Specific Hazard
In a setting with competing events, the rate at which one particular type of event happens among people still event-free at that moment. It treats other competing events as simply removing people from the at-risk group.
Also called: cause-specific hazard rate.
When patients can experience several mutually exclusive outcomes, such as death from cancer versus death from other causes, each outcome has its own cause-specific hazard. This quantity answers biological questions about what drives a given event's rate, and it is what a standard Cox model targets when competing events are censored. It does not by itself translate into the actual probability of that event occurring, because competing events also shape who remains at risk. For the cumulative probability of the event, readers need the companion subdistribution approach.
This is a plain-language methodology definition for reading research. It is general education, not medical advice.