Published in American journal of epidemiology
Head and neck cancer (HNC) risk prediction models based on risk factor profiles have not yet been developed. We took advantage of the large database including 14 studies (1981-2010) in the US from the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology (INHANCE) Consortium to develop risk prediction models. Seventy percent of the data were used to deve...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Random-effects meta-analysis is one of the mainstream methods for research synthesis. The heterogeneity in meta-analyses is usually assumed to follow a normal distribution. This is actually a strong assumption, but one that often receives little attention and is used without justification. Although methods for assessing the normality assumption are...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Healthy lifestyle are promising targets for prevention of cognitive aging, yet the optimal time-windows for interventions remain unclear. We selected a case-control sample nested within the Nurses' Health Study (starting year 1976, mean age=51 years-old), including 14,956 women aged ≥70 years and free of both stroke and cognitive impairment at enro...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
American football is the most popular high school sport yet its association with health in adulthood has not been widely studied. We investigated the association between high school football and self-rated health, obesity, and pain in adulthood using a retrospective cohort study of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study from 1957 to 2004. We matched 925 ...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Prenatal maternal smoking is a risk factor for lower birth weight. We performed epigenome-wide association analyses of placental DNA methylation (DNAm) at 720,077 cytosine-phosphate-guanine (CpG) sites and prenatal maternal smoking among 441 mother-infant pairs (2010-2014) and evaluated whether DNAm mediates the association between smoking and birt...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Childhood blood pressure (BP) is a strong predictor of later risk of cardiovascular disease. However, few studies have assessed dynamic BP trajectories throughout the early-life period. We investigated the relationship between early-life factors and systolic BP (SBP) from infancy to adolescence using linear spline mixed-effects models among 1,370 c...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Multiple imputation (MI) is a well-established method for dealing with missing data. MI is computationally intensive when imputing missing covariates with high-dimensional outcome data (e.g., DNA methylation data in epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS)), because every outcome variable must be included in the imputation model to avoid biasing a...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Previous studies have suggested a "J-shaped" relationship between body mass index (BMI, calculated as weight (kg)/height (m)2) and survival among head and neck cancer (HNC) patients. However, BMI is a vague measure of body composition. To provide greater resolution, we used Bayesian sensitivity analysis, informed by external data, to model the rela...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
A higher level of physical activity (PA) is associated with decreased risk of mortality, dementia, and depression, yet the mechanisms involved are not well understood, and little evidence exists for Mexican Americans. With data from the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (1998-2007), we used Cox proportional hazards regression to separately eval...
Published in American journal of epidemiology
Caregivers have lower mortality rates than noncaregivers in population-based studies, which contradicts the caregiver-stress model and raises speculation about selection bias influencing these findings. We examined possible selection bias due to 1) sampling decisions and 2) selective participation among women (baseline mean age = 79 years) in the C...
