Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco.
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco.
Ann Epidemiol. 2020 Oct;50:48-51.e2. doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2020.06.008. Epub 2020 Jul 2.
We examined whether weighting techniques could account for longitudinal differences in disease activity by race/ethnicity between research participants and nonparticipants with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
We included 377 patients with RA from a public hospital in San Francisco, CA. We estimated the probability of not enrolling in a research study by constructing weights using inverse probability weighting. Disease activity over time by race/ethnicity was analyzed across the entire patient population and among research participants only using multivariable mixed-effects models.
There were no differences in RA disease activity scores between research participants and nonparticipants at baseline; however, longitudinal differences in disease activity between research participants and nonparticipants were found by race/ethnicity. Weighting research participants in accordance with sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of the nonparticipant population did not result in any meaningful changes in disease activity by race/ethnicity over time.
In our study of patients with RA, inverse probability weighting using select sociodemographic and clinical variables was not sufficient to account for longitudinal disease activity differences by race/ethnicity between research participants and nonparticipants.
我们研究了在类风湿关节炎（RA）患者中，是否可以通过权重技术来解释研究参与者和非参与者之间因种族/民族而导致的疾病活动的纵向差异。
我们纳入了来自加利福尼亚州旧金山一家公立医院的 377 名 RA 患者。我们通过使用逆概率加权来构建权重，估计了不参加研究的概率。使用多变量混合效应模型，我们在整个患者群体中以及仅在研究参与者中分析了随时间变化的疾病活动与种族/民族之间的关系。
在基线时，研究参与者和非参与者之间的 RA 疾病活动评分没有差异；然而，我们发现研究参与者和非参与者之间的疾病活动存在纵向的种族/民族差异。根据非参与者人群的社会人口学和临床特征对研究参与者进行加权，并没有导致疾病活动随时间变化的任何有意义的种族/民族差异。
在我们对 RA 患者的研究中，使用选定的社会人口学和临床变量进行逆概率加权，不足以解释研究参与者和非参与者之间因种族/民族而导致的纵向疾病活动差异。
