Cancer Clustering for Residential Histories

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目将开发一种新的方法来评估病例对照数据中考虑居住历史的聚类。目前，很少有方法可以利用流行病学病例对照研究的数据来建模和分析居住史。将根据最近邻关系矩阵集开发居住历史的本地、全球和重点测试，这些矩阵集反映了案例和控制的居住地址的时空几何变化。将定义解释暴露与疾病表现之间的潜伏期的暴露轨迹，以及使用不同持续时间的暴露窗口。由此衍生的几种方法将用于评估密歇根州东南部正在进行的膀胱癌病例对照研究中居住史的聚类。由于人类是可移动的，这些新方法相对于忽略居住历史，而只依赖于诊断或死亡时的居住地点的方法是重大的进步。主要的创新是创造了分析和模拟病例和控制的居住历史的方法，以确定研究人群本身以及与假定的危害（如致癌物的点源释放）相关的地理过度癌症风险。在这个项目中开发的技术和软件将提供一个更简洁和准确的癌症病例集群描述，包括居住史、癌症潜伏期、诊断时间和假定发生致癌暴露的暴露窗口。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will develop a new approach for evaluating clustering in case-control data that accounts for residential histories. At present, few if any methods exist for modeling and analyzing residential histories using data from epidemiologic case-control studies. Local, global and focused tests for residential histories will be developed based on sets of matrices of nearest neighbor relationships that reflect the changing space-time geometry of the residential addresses of cases and controls. Exposure traces that account for the latency between exposure and disease manifestation, and that use exposure windows of varying duration will be defined. Several of the methods so derived will be applied to evaluate clustering of residential histories in an ongoing case-control study of bladder cancer in south eastern Michigan. Because humans are mobile, these new methods are a significant advance over approaches that ignore residential histories and instead rely only on place of residence at time of diagnosis or death. The major innovation is the creation of methods for analyzing and modeling the residential histories of cases and controls to identify geographic excesses of cancer risk, both in the study population itself as well as in relation to putative hazards such as point-source releases of carcinogens. The techniques and software to be developed in this project will provide a more concise and accurate description of clustering of cancer cases that accounts for residential history, cancer latency, time of diagnosis, and the exposure windows during which causative exposures are hypothesized to have occurred.