The Validity and Efficiency of the Common Effect Test for Subtype Analysis in Case-Case Studies

• Activity Number: 92
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 4, 2013 : 8:30 PM to 10:30 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Molin Wang and Aya Kuchiba*+ and Donna Spiegelman
• Companies: Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard School of Public Health
• Keywords: Subtype analysis ; Common effect test ; Case-case study ; Efficiency

Abstract

The field of "Molecular Pathological Epidemiology (MPE)" hypothesizes differential risks of exposure for different disease subtypes within a single disease entity. Hypothesis tests in MPE analyses can be categorized into two types of tests: subtype-specific tests, which assess an exposure effect on a particular disease subtype, and the common effect test, which compares the exposure effect across disease subtypes. MPE research can conducted using three different study designs: the prospective cohort, the case-control and the case-case. In this presentation, it will be shown that the common effect can be validly assessed in case-case studies by explicitly deriving the relationship between the relevant statistical models and their parameters in the three designs mentioned above. The efficiency of the common effect test in the case-case study will also be compared to that based on a case-control study, analytically and through simulation studies. Findings will be illustrated in a study of LINE-1 methylation sub-types of colon cancer in relation to alcohol intake.