近十年來，利用雞尾酒療法 (高效抗逆轉錄病毒療法) 治療愛滋病 (後天免疫缺乏症候群)，已經被廣泛提倡且使用。目前也有大量的研究顯示，此種療法對於治療愛滋病確實有正面的效果。而在各種衡量愛滋病情嚴重程度的指標當中，CD4/CD8 比值是其中一種衡量的指標。本篇論文則是希望透過該指標，探討雞尾酒療法對於愛滋病人存活時間的影響，進而瞭解 CD4/CD8 比值和愛滋病人存活時間的關係。由於此類臨床資料通常同時包含長期追蹤資料及存活時間，為了能有效的進行長期追蹤資料的分析，且在不失去存活資訊的情況下，本篇論文使用了 Wulfsohn 和 Tsiatis (1997) 所提出的聯合模型，並且針對此模型做延伸，導入蒙地卡羅的數值方法，使得此聯合模型方更簡便也更有效率。同時，本篇論文也利用了三種圖形對於資料做了初步的描述，如趨勢圖、事件歷史圖 (Dubin, M"uller, and Wang, 2001) 和 3-D 平滑曲面圖。以上三種圖形不僅能同時呈現出長期追蹤資料的資訊和存活資訊，亦有助於瞭解資料的特性。最後，利用以上所述之方法應用於台灣 160 位愛滋病已發病病人的資料，實際分析其療法之成效。 The famous treatment, HAART (Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy), has been advocated for the recent decade for AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) patients. Also, large amount of researches reveal its efficacy for treating AIDS. The biomarker, CD4/CD8 ratio, is one of the important way of detecting the disease progression. The objective of this paper is to probe the impact of HAART on survival time for AIDS patients and identify the association between CD4/CD8 ratio and survival time for AIDS patients. In order to combine effectively both longitudinal and survival information from this kind of data, we propose an extension of joint model in Wulfsohn and Tsiatis (1997). Instead of Gauss-Hermite quadrature, Monte Carlo integration is employed in the joint model to make it easier to implement and more efficient to derive estimates. Meanwhile, graphic skills such as profile, event history graph (Dubin, M"uller, and Wang, 2001), and 3-D surface accompanied contour plots are proffered not only to exhibit simultaneously the longitudinal and survival information but also to detect the features of data. The aforementioned techniques are applied to a clinical data of AIDS patients in Taiwan.
