Effects of Chemical Mixtures on the Risk of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma

• Activity Number: 135
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 4, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Jenna Czarnota*+ and Chris Gennings and David Wheeler
• Companies: Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Commonwealth University and Virginia Commonwealth University
• Keywords: cancer ; environment ; regression

Abstract

Given that humans are exposed to a multitude of environmental chemicals simultaneously, it is of particular importance to examine the relationship between chemical mixtures and disease risk. Exposure profiles may change spatially, and thus it is also necessary to consider the impact of varying exposure patterns on the effect of a chemical mixture. A weighted quantile sum (WQS) approach was used in conjunction with non-linear logistic regression to model the association of a mixture of 27 correlated environmental chemicals measured in house dust and risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). The data were obtained from the National Cancer Institute Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results Program NHL case-control study. Analyses were performed overall (full data set) and locally (separately at each of 4 study sites), demonstrating differences in exposure, mixture effect, and relative importance of individual chemicals. Through simulation studies, the performance of WQS regression was examined in comparison to traditional shrinkage methods in terms of sensitivity and specificity in the selection of harmful chemicals.