Estimating Sibling Recurrence Risk In Population Sample Surveys

• Activity Number: 250
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Barry Ira Graubard*+ and Monroe G. Sirken
• Companies: National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Keywords: counting rule ; network estimation ; sampling errors ; reporting errors

Abstract

Sibling recurrence risk (SRR) is a measure of familial aggregation of a disease and is often used in family-based studies in genetic epidemiology to indicate the existence of possible genes conferring susceptibility of disease. Estimating SRR requires information about the disease status of sibships of families with affected children. Since family-based studies are not usually random samples, estimates of SRR derived from these studies may be biased. Probability samples of individuals obtained in surveys such as the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) can be used to obtained unbiased estimators of SRR and its related SRR ratio (SRR divided by the prevalence of disease). Two methods of ascertaining sibships of affected families are described and illustrated for estimating SRR and SRR ratio for diabetes from the NHIS. Estimators of standard errors of SRR and SRR ratio are provided along with consideration of reporting error to compare the ascertainment methods.