Interrelating of Longitudinal Processes: An Empirical Example

• Activity Number: 257
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 2, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Tamika Y.N. Royal-Thomas*+ and Daniel McGee and Debajyoti Sinha and Clive Osmond and Terrence Forrester
• Companies: Florida State University and Florida State University and Florida State University and Medical Research Council Epidemiology Resource Centre and Tropical Medicine Research Institute
• Keywords: Linear Mixed Model ; multivariate ; longitudinal ; joint modeling ; cardiovascular health ; random effects

Abstract

The Barker Hypothesis states that maternal and "in utero" attributes during pregnancy affects a child's cardiovascular health throughout life. We present a preliminary analysis of a unique longitudinal dataset that consists of three longitudinal processes: (i)Maternal longitudinal process - Blood pressure and anthropometric measurements at seven time-points on the mother during pregnancy. (ii)In Utero measurements - Ultrasound measurements of the fetus taken at six time-points during pregnancy. (iii)Birth to present process - Children's measurements at 24 time-points from birth to 14 years. A preliminary analysis of the interrelationship of these three longitudinal processes will be presented using joint modeling for multivariate longitudinal profiles. We focus on whether the process in mothers predicts fetal development which then predicts the future cardiovascular health of the child.