Evidence-appraisal glossary
Informative Censoring
When people leave a study before an event for reasons tied to their underlying risk, so those still being followed no longer represent everyone. It quietly biases survival estimates.
Also called: dependent censoring, informative dropout.
Standard survival methods assume censoring is uninformative, meaning that at any moment those who drop out share the same future risk as those who remain under observation. Informative censoring breaks that assumption: if the sickest patients withdraw, the remaining group looks healthier than the true population and survival is overstated. Because the missing outcomes are hidden, this bias cannot be fully detected from the data alone. Readers should ask why participants were censored and whether those reasons could relate to prognosis.
This is a plain-language methodology definition for reading research. It is general education, not medical advice.