American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on August 21, 2006
American Journal of Epidemiology 2006 164(7):697-705; doi:10.1093/aje/kwj256
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Practice of Epidemiology |
Familial Relative Risk Estimates for Use in Epidemiologic Analyses
1 Department of Public Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
2 Cancer Prevention Program, Division of Public Health Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA
3 University of Wisconsin Comprehensive Cancer Center, Madison, WI
4 Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, Nashville, TN
Correspondence to Dr. Yutaka Yasui, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Alberta, 13-106J Clinical Sciences Building, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2G3, Canada (e-mail: yyasui{at}ualberta.ca).
Commonly used crude measures of disease risk or relative risk in a family, such as the presence/absence of disease or the number of affected relatives, do not take into account family structures and ages at disease occurrence. The Family History Score incorporates these factors and has been used widely in epidemiology. However, the Family History Score is not an estimate of familial relative risk; rather, it corresponds to a measure of statistical significance against a null hypothesis that the family's disease risk is equal to that expected from reference rates. In this paper, the authors consider an estimate of familial relative risk using the empirical Bayes framework. The approach uses a two-level hierarchical model in which the first level models familial relative risk and the second considers a Poisson count of the number of affected relatives given the familial relative risk from the first level. The authors illustrate the utility of this methodology in a large, population-based case-control study of breast cancer, showing that, compared with commonly used summaries of family history including the Family History Score, the new estimates are more strongly associated with case-control status and more clearly detect effect modification of an environmental risk factor by familial relative risk.
Bayes theorem; family; Poisson distribution; regression analysis; risk
Abbreviations: AFB, age at first birth; CBCS II, Collaborative Breast Cancer Study II; FSIR, Familial Standardized Incidence Ratio; MLE, maximum likelihood estimator
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  E. Kampman A First-Degree Relative with Colorectal Cancer: What Are We Missing? Cancer Epidemiol. Biomarkers Prev., January 1, 2007; 16(1): 1 - 3. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|