American Journal of Epidemiology Vol. 152, No. 1 : 67-74
Copyright © 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health
ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS |
Subject-Domain Approach to the Study of Air Pollution Effects on Schoolchildren's Illness Absence
1 Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.
2 Institute of Epidemiology, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
3 Institute of Industrial Hygiene and Occupational Medicine, College of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
4 Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.
5 Department of Public Health, Kaohsiung Medical College, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
In this paper, the authors propose a new statistical modeling technique, the subject-domain approach, which is theoretically proven to be equivalent to the time-domain approach in detecting an association between exposure and response with time trends. The authors use an empirical data set from a school absence monitoring study conducted during the 1994–1995 school year in Taiwan to demonstrate this subject-domain approach's application to environmental epidemiologic studies. Because the subject-domain models can control the influential personal confounding factors in the models, they show greater statistical power than the traditional time-domain approaches in determining the relation between air pollution and illness absences. The authors' models found that the schoolchildren's risks of illness absence were significantly related to acute exposures to nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides with a 1-day lag (p < 0.01) at levels below the World Health Organization's guidelines. By contrast, the authors could not detect significant associations between air pollution and schoolchildren's absenteeism using time-domain approaches. Such findings imply that the models built on subject domain may be a general solution to the problem of the ecologic fallacy, which is commonly encountered in environmental and social epidemiologic studies.
air pollution; epidemiologic methods; nitrogen dioxide; statistics; time-dependent covariate; time series
Abbreviations: PM10, particulate matter with a diameter less than 10 µm; SOAP&HIT, Study On Air Pollution and Health In Taiwan
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