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REGRESSION MODELS FOR COHORT MORTALITY STUDIES
Citation:
Whitemore, A. REGRESSION MODELS FOR COHORT MORTALITY STUDIES. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/J-86/545.
Description:
Cohort studies evaluate suspect health hazards from occupational or environmental exposures by recording tile facts and causes of deaths in the exposed group as they occur over an extended time period. his article reviews several methods for analyzing cohort: mortality data and shows them to be special cases of a single procedure. he procedure represents death rates as the product of an age-specific baseline rate that: applies in the absence of exposure, times a function of exposures. aximum likelihood methods are used to estimate unknown regression parameters in the function of exposures. he loglikelihood kernel for the data is shown to be that of N independent Poisson variate; where N is the total number of person-units of mortality observation time in the study. he expected values of these variate depend on the exposures and regression parameters. he latter can be estimated using packaged software programs for Poisson regression on any microcomputer that supports ANSI Standard FORTRAN.