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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2007
American Journal of Epidemiology 2007 166(7):852-856; doi:10.1093/aje/kwm143
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American Journal of Epidemiology © The Author 2007. Published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

PRACTICE OF EPIDEMIOLOGY

Feasibility of Nationwide Birth Registry Control Selection in the United States

Logan G. Spector1,2, Julie A. Ross1,2, Susan E. Puumala1, Michelle Roesler1, Andrew F. Olshan3 and Greta R. Bunin4

1 Division of Epidemiology/Clinical Research, Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
2 Cancer Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
3 Department of Epidemiology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
4 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA

Correspondence to Dr. Logan G. Spector, Division of Epidemiology/Clinical Research, Department of Pediatrics, University of Minnesota, 420 Delaware Street, SE, MMC 715, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (e-mail: spector{at}epi.umn.edu).

Received for publication March 7, 2007. Accepted for publication April 9, 2007.

As random digit dialing becomes increasingly unfeasible for many types of studies, alternative methods for control selection are needed, especially for studies of childhood cancer. US birth registries are an appealing source of young control children because they are population based, provide demographic and pregnancy data for comparison of participants with the study base, and maintain data that enable matching on birth characteristics. Here the authors describe the ability of US birth registries to release information sufficient to locate potential control subjects for two ongoing case-control studies of hepatoblastoma and infant leukemia. The birth registries of 32 states, in which 75.8% of US children 0–5 years of age resided in 2004, agreed to participate in control selection. Data sufficient to track participants and to characterize nonrespondents were available from a majority of registries. These results suggest that birth registries may be used to select controls for studies of rare childhood diseases on a national scale.

case-control studies; methods; neoplasms; pediatrics; sampling studies

Abbreviations: RDD, random digit dialing


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