Summary
Traditional methods of occupational cohort analysis have used the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) as the fundamental measure of association between risk factor and disease. The SMR is shown here to result from maximum likelihood estimation in a multiplicative statistical model involving known national death rates. The same model permits regression analysis of variations in the SMR according to the intensity, type, or duration of exposure to environmental agents.
A second method of analysis (COX,1972) results when the underlying death rates are treated as an unknown nuisance function. Case-control sampling from the “risk sets” formed during analysis leads to a third technique which is computationally more efficient than the other two.
All three methods yield roughly equivalent measures of the relative risk of respiratory cancer associated with arsenic trioxide exposure among a cohort of Montana smelter workers. Questions of efficiency, bias and cost in the selection of a method of analysis are discussed.
Research supported in part by USPHS grant 1 K07 CA00723 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
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Dedicated to Professor Dr. Otto Westphal on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
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© 1983 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Breslow, N.E. (1983). Statistical Methods for Cohort and Case-Control Studies. In: Berger, J., Höhne, K.H. (eds) Methoden der Statistik und Informatik in Epidemiologie und Diagnostik. Medizinische Informatik und Statistik, vol 40. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-81938-4_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-81938-4_12
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