Spatial Analysis of Environmental Risk in Cancer Case-Control Studies with Residential Histories

• Activity Number: 290
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2013 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): David Wheeler*+ and Catherine A. Calder and Kevin Donges
• Companies: Virginia Commonwealth University and Ohio State University and The Ohio State University
• Keywords: cancer ; environment ; spatial risk

Abstract

The role of the environment is increasingly recognized as important in explaining variation in cancer risk. Exploring spatial patterns of disease incidence can identify areas of significantly elevated or decreased risk, providing potential clues about environmental risk factors. Typical case-control studies, however, suffer from a lack of population mobility data. Case-control studies with residential histories allow investigators to study the effects of quantified past environmental exposures, as well as assess spatial pattern in unknown historic exposures. However, approaches for analyzing the temporal dimension of the effects of past measured and unmeasured environmental exposures are not well developed for this type of study. In this research, we apply different modeling strategies to explain bladder cancer risk in a large, population-based case-control study conducted in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont from 2001 to 2004 that contains residential histories and exposures to arsenic and chlorination byproducts. Our models seek to account for several environmental exposures, population mobility, and disease latency while identifying areas of significantly elevated risk.