Statistical Methods in Disease Risk Assessment and Prediction

National Institute Of Environmental Health Sciences

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Abstract

Under this project, we continued to develop an approach to handle assay limit of detection in environmental mixture studies. Conventional approaches to deal with coveriates subject to LOD, including complete-case analysis, substitution methods and parametric modeling of the covariate distribution, are feasible but may result in efficiency loss or bias. We considered a multivariate accelerated failure time model for the multiple correlated covariates subject to LOD and a generalized linear model for the outcome. A two-stage procedure based on semiparametric pseudo-likelihood is proposed for estimating the effects of environmental mixtures on the health outcome. We illustrate the practical utility of the methodology with the LIFECODES birth cohort data, where we compare our approach to existing approaches in analysis of multiple urinary trace metals in association with oxidative stress in pregnant women.