Sociological macro analyses of the association between risk factors and mortality can be seen as a valuable supplement to epidemiological micro studies. However, sociologists and epidemiologists typically employ different measures of association and this hampers strict comparisons of findings. This study presents a synthetic approach relying on both micro and macro data. In Part 1, the mathemat...

A cohort study consisting of 4,291 residents of a Japanese community has been conducted since 1987. The associations between stressful feelings measured by Stress Arousal Checklist (SACL) and mortality of all causes and cancer were examined. The relative risks (RRs) for mortality for 7 years for high stressful state (SACL score: 7-17) and moderate stressful state (3-6) subjects compared with lo...

Risk, and related measures of effect size (for categorical outcomes) such as relative risks and odds ratios, are frequently presented in research articles. Not all readers know how these statistics are derived and interpreted, nor are all readers aware of their strengths and limitations. This article examines several measures, including absolute risk, attributable risk, attributable risk percen...

Vaccine efficacy and effectiveness (VE) are generally measured as 1 minus some measure of relative risk (RR) in the vaccinated group compared with the unvaccinated group (VE = 1 - RR). In designing a study to evaluate vaccination, the type of effect and the question of interest determine the appropriate choice of comparison population and parameter. Possible questions of interest include that o...

OBJECTIVE To review the statistical approaches to test for spatial heterogeneity of relative risks. Three different statistical tests (Gail, Martuzzi-Hills and Potthoff-Whittinghill) are reviewed and applied--as motivating example--to the analysis of cause-specific mortality records (years: 1991-2000) of the Municipalities belonging to the Local Health Unit Alto Vicentino. METHODS Spatial het...

This package computes relative risks for both prospective and retrospective samples using GLM and Logit-Log transformations. It will always produce relative risk estimates, although it may fail sometimes to produce confidence intervals.

In a cohort of 27,578 postmenopausal Iowa women, we examined whether the risk with a family history of breast cancer differs by self-reported ethnicity. A total of 1042 breast cancer cases occurred over 10 years of follow-up. Using a phylogenetic tree, ethnicities were combined into five groups: Scandinavian; English, Scottish, Welsh, and Dutch (ESWD); Irish; German; and Other European. The inc...

Epidemiologists have long regarded relative risk (RR) as a key measure of association between two binary variables. Yet even when the sample is representative of the population, associations having a RR > 9 may have a relatively small value for Phi (φ < .3). This paper provide additional reasons for using RR instead of φ. (1) Formulas relating φ and RR are derived. A relative φ 2 is constructed...