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Activity Number: 680
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Thursday, August 8, 2013 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
Abstract - #309680
Title: Assessing the Association Between Time-to-Pregnancy and Woman-Specific Menstrual Cycle Length Mean and Variability Using a Bayesian Hierarchical Model
Author(s): Kirsten Lum*+ and Germaine M. Buck Louis and Thomas A. Louis and Rajeshwari Sundaram
Companies: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Keywords: Bayesian hierarchical model ; joint model ; longitudinal ; menstrual cycle ; time-to-pregnancy ; variability
Abstract:

There is considerable interest in the impact of the variability of longitudinal risk factors on time-to-event health outcomes. A motivating example of this from prospective pregnancy studies is the role that menstrual cycle length variability may play in time-to-pregnancy (TTP). We propose a joint model composed of a Bayesian hierarchical model for longitudinal menstrual cycle length, with a flexible parametric distribution that allows for skewness, and a grouped transformation model for TTP. In the longitudinal model, we use a fully Bayesian approach to estimate the posterior distribution of unobserved features of a woman's underlying distribution of cycle lengths (e.g. mean, variance, IQR, etc.), as a function of longitudinally observed cycle lengths and prior parameters, weighted by the number of cycles. We use Markov chain Monte Carlo to obtain the unconditional survivor and hazard functions for estimation of TTP parameters. We compare mixing over the full posterior distribution versus using a point estimate of the mean of the posterior; and we illustrate our approach with data from the Longitudinal Investigation of Fertility and the Environment Study.


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