Statistical Methods In Human Development/clinical Studie

该项目力求为人类发展中的问题开发新的统计技术，并以新的方式将现有技术应用于这些问题。在过去的一年里，工作重点是应用统计技术来研究一种儿童疾病，注意力缺陷/多动障碍(ADHD)和两种与衰老有关的神经疾病，肌萎缩侧索硬化症(ALS)和帕金森病。 对于ADHD，我们正在当地的一个学区进行一项病例对照研究。我们最近发表了关于我们在实地研究中识别病例的方法以及试点结果的说明。我们还检查了家长报告中评估的小学生ADHD的药物使用流行率。我们令人惊讶的发现是，药物使用的流行率约为7%，超过了通常所说的疾病流行率，即3-5%。对于肌萎缩侧索硬化症，基于我们进行的病例对照研究，我们检查了血液和骨铅水平作为疾病风险因素。我们发现，血铅水平与疾病的关系比骨铅水平更密切，这与骨铅作为长期接触的指标应该是更好的风险指标的观点相反。帕金森氏病研究的规划和前期工作已经完成，现场数据收集工作正在进行中。

This project seeks to develop new statistical techniques for problems in human development and to apply existing techniques to those problems in novel ways. In the past year, work focused on applications of statistical techniques to study a disease of childhood, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and two neurological diseases of aging, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson's disease. For ADHD, we are carrying out a case-control study in a local school district. We have recently published a description of our method for identifying cases in a field study as well as pilot results. We have also examined the prevalence of medication use for ADHD among elementary school children as assessed by parental report. Our surprising finding is that the prevalence of medication use, about 7%, exceeds the often stated prevalence of the disease, namely, 3-5%. For ALS, based on a case-control study that we conducted, we examined blood and bone lead levels as risk factors for the disease. We found that blood lead levels were more closely associated with disease than bone lead levels, contrary to the view that bone lead, as indicative of long-term exposures, should be the better indicator of risk. The planning and preliminary work of the Parkinson's disease study is complete and field data collection is now underway.