病例基底研究中風險及相對風險的估計方法

Abstract

Both the absolute and the relative risks (RR) of disease have a crucial role to play in epidemiology. RR is often approximated by odds ratio under the rare-disease assumption in case-control study. However, such a study design does not provide an estimate for absolute risk. In this thesis, we develop a method in estimating risks and relative risks in case-base study. It contains two main themes. In the first part, we propose a logistic model for the case-base study. The model is flexible enough to admit multiple exposures in any measurements. It can be easily fitted using common statistical packages. With one additional step of simple calculations of the model parameters, one readily obtains relative and absolute risk estimates as well as their confidence intervals. The occurrences of many diseases are the interplays of genes, environments and their interactions. In the second part, we elaborate how to incorporate the assumptions of gene-environment independence and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium into the logistic model to further improve statistical efficiency.