Ascertainment bias in rate ratio estimation from case-sibling control studies of variable age-at-onset diseases

Biometrics
B LangholzL Goldstein

Abstract

Motivated by a Finnish case-control study of early onset diabetes in which diabetic children are matched to sibling controls, we investigate ascertainment bias of the usual rate ratio estimator from case-control data under simplex complete ascertainment of families during a fixed interval of time. Analytic results indicate that the assumptions necessary for valid estimation are that the disease is rare and the factors under study are exchangeable--essentially that the covariate distribution does not depend on calendar time or birth order. Further, we found that the rare disease assumption could be dropped by restricting to cases that were diagnosed during the enrollment period of the study or including all cases but eliminating the proband as a control for non-enrollment-period cases. An important consequence of this work is that standard family-based case-control studies are subject to ascertainment bias if exchangeability of the covariates under investigation does not hold.

Citations

Jan 10, 2008·JAMA : the Journal of the American Medical Association·Colin B BeggJonine L Bernstein
Jun 9, 2009·Inflammatory Bowel Diseases·Marie JoossensMathias Chamaillard
Sep 11, 2004·Journal of Clinical Epidemiology·N Andrieu, A M Goldstein
Mar 25, 2006·International Journal of Epidemiology·Alisa M GoldsteinNadine Andrieu
Aug 15, 2006·Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health·Esben AgerboPreben Bo Mortensen
Nov 10, 2004·Statistics in Medicine·Peter Kraft, Duncan C Thomas
Oct 15, 2003·Genetic Epidemiology·Alice S Whittemore, Jerry Halpern
Sep 15, 2005·Annals of Epidemiology·Nadine AndrieuAlisa M Goldstein

❮ Previous
Next ❯

Related Concepts

Related Feeds

Autoimmune Diabetes & Tolerance

Patients with type I diabetes lack insulin-producing beta cells due to the loss of immunological tolerance and autoimmune disease. Discover the latest research on targeting tolerance to prevent diabetes.