Analysis of case-control age-at-onset data using a modified case-cohort method.

Full Abstract

Case-control designs are widely used in rare disease studies. In a typical case-control study, data are collected from a sample of all available subjects who have experienced a disease (cases) and a sub-sample of subjects who have not experienced the disease (controls) in a study cohort. Cases are oversampled in case-control studies. Logistic regression is a common tool to estimate the relative risks of the disease with respect to a set of covariates. Very often in such a study, information of ages-at-onset of the disease for all cases and ages at survey of controls are known. Standard logistic regression analysis using age as a covariate is based on a dichotomous outcome and does not efficiently use such age-at-onset (time-to-event) information. We propose to analyze age-at-onset data using a modified case-cohort method by treating the control group as an approximation of a subcohort assuming rare events. We investigate the asymptotic bias of this approximation and show that the asymptotic bias of the proposed estimator is small when the disease rate is low. We evaluate the finite sample performance of the proposed method through a simulation study and illustrate the method using a breast cancer case-control data set.

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Author information

Author/s: Nan, Bin (B); Lin, Xihong (X);

Affiliation: Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2029, USA. bnan(-atsign-)umich.edu

Grants: R01 CA76404 (Agency:United States NCI)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Biometrical journal. Biometrische Zeitschrift (Biom J), published in Germany. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Apr; vol 50 (issue 2) : pp 311-20

Dates: Created 2008/04/03; Completed 2008/05/13;

PMID: 18318038, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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