Two-Stage Approach for Identifying Tumor Subtypes Associated with an Exposure

• Activity Number: 348
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): Aya Kuchiba*+ and Molin Wang and Donna Spiegelman
• Companies: National Cancer Center and Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard School of Public Health
• Keywords: cancer epidemiology ; etiologic heterogeneity ; molecular subtypes ; meta-regression method

Abstract

In cancer epidemiological research, there has been increasing interest in evaluating etiologic heterogeneity among subtypes defined by molecular markers. Several studies have reported that the associations with the exposure of interest vary by subtypes, which are typically defined by one molecular change, e.g., BRAF mutated or wild type. However, many molecular markers are correlated. The associations between the exposure and subtypes defined by one marker may be affected by the status of the other markers. In this talk, we will present a two-stage approach based on the meta-regression method to identify the subtypes characterized by one or more of candidate multiple markers that are uniquely associated with an exposure of interest. This approach can identify important molecular changes under controlling the influence of the other markers. To illustrate our approach, we examine the associations between smoking status and colorectal cancer subtypes cross-classified by three molecular markers including BRAF mutation, microsatellite instability and CpG island methylation phenotype in the Nurses' Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-up Study.