Jacquez Geoffrey M, Kaufmann Andy, Meliker Jaymie, Goovaerts Pierre, AvRuskin Gillian, Nriagu Jerome
BioMedware, Inc., 516 North State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104-1236, USA.
Environ Health. 2005 Mar 22;4(1):4. doi: 10.1186/1476-069X-4-4.
This paper introduces a new approach for evaluating clustering in case-control data that accounts for residential histories. Although many statistics have been proposed for assessing local, focused and global clustering in health outcomes, few, if any, exist for evaluating clusters when individuals are mobile.
Local, global and focused tests for residential histories are developed based on sets of matrices of nearest neighbor relationships that reflect the changing topology of cases and controls. Exposure traces are defined that account for the latency between exposure and disease manifestation, and that use exposure windows whose duration may vary. Several of the methods so derived are applied to evaluate clustering of residential histories in a case-control study of bladder cancer in south eastern Michigan. These data are still being collected and the analysis is conducted for demonstration purposes only.
Statistically significant clustering of residential histories of cases was found but is likely due to delayed reporting of cases by one of the hospitals participating in the study.
Data with residential histories are preferable when causative exposures and disease latencies occur on a long enough time span that human mobility matters. To analyze such data, methods are needed that take residential histories into account.
本文介绍了一种评估病例对照数据中聚类情况的新方法，该方法考虑了居住史。尽管已经提出了许多统计方法来评估健康结果中的局部、聚焦和全局聚类，但在个体具有流动性时，用于评估聚类的方法却很少，即便有也寥寥无几。
基于反映病例和对照不断变化的拓扑结构的最近邻关系矩阵集，开发了针对居住史的局部、全局和聚焦检验。定义了暴露轨迹，其考虑了暴露与疾病表现之间的潜伏期，并使用持续时间可能不同的暴露窗口。由此得出的几种方法被应用于评估密歇根州东南部膀胱癌病例对照研究中居住史的聚类情况。这些数据仍在收集当中，进行分析仅用于演示目的。
发现病例的居住史存在统计学上显著的聚类，但这可能是由于参与研究的其中一家医院延迟报告病例所致。
当致病暴露和疾病潜伏期发生在足够长的时间跨度上以至于人员流动很重要时，包含居住史的数据更可取。为了分析此类数据，需要采用考虑居住史的方法。
