Assessment of Residential History Generation in the Spatial Analysis of Disease Risk

• Activity Number: 603
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Epidemiology
• Author(s): David Wheeler*
• Companies: Virginia Commonwealth University
• Keywords: residential history ; population mobility ; spatial epidemiology ; latency

Abstract

In studies of the spatial risk of disease, researchers typically search for a spatial signal using the residential location as a surrogate for environmental exposures. Residential location at time of diagnosis is typically used when residential histories are not collected in studies. However, simulation studies show that the levels of population mobility in the United States are sufficient to obscure the spatial signal related to pertinent, historic environmental exposures for diseases with long latencies. To create residential histories for study subjects, we queried a public records database for addresses between 1995 to 2013 for a subset of subjects in the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study and developed computer programs to match the addresses to subject-reported addresses. We created 10 metrics to evaluate the ability of the public database to replicate address histories for subjects in the AARP cohort. The results show that the mean match rate was 84% for city names and 78% for detailed street addresses. The initial results suggest that public record databases can be useful for reconstructing residential histories for subjects in epidemiologic studies.