A Practical Guide to Family Studies with Lifetime Data

Author(s):  
Thomas H. Scheike ◽  
Klaus Kähler Holst

Familial aggregation refers to the fact that a particular disease may be overrepresented in some families due to genetic or environmental factors. When studying such phenomena, it is clear that one important aspect is the age of onset of the disease in question, and in addition, the data will typically be right-censored. Therefore, one must apply lifetime data methods to quantify such dependence and to separate it into different sources using polygenic modeling. Another important point is that the occurrence of a particular disease can be prevented by death—that is, competing risks—and therefore, the familial aggregation should be studied in a model that allows for both death and the occurrence of the disease. We here demonstrate how polygenic modeling can be done for both survival data and competing risks data dealing with right-censoring. The competing risks modeling that we focus on is closely related to the liability threshold model. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 9 is March 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Wang ◽  
Yu Cheng

AbstractIn this paper we extend the bivariate hazard ratio to multivariate competing risks data and show that it is equivalent to the cause-specific cross hazard ratio. Two approaches are proposed to estimate these two equivalent association measures. One extends the plug-in estimator, and the other adapts the pseudo-likelihood estimator for bivariate survival data to multivariate competing risks data. The asymptotic properties of the extended estimators are established by using empirical processes techniques. The extended plug-in and pseudo-likelihood estimators have comparable performance with the existing U-statistic when the data have no tied events. However, in many applications, there are tied events in which all the three estimators are found to produce biased results. To our best knowledge, we are not aware of any association analysis for multivariate competing risks data that has considered tied events. Hence we propose a modified U-statistic to specifically handle tied observations. The modified U-statistic clearly outperforms the other estimators when there are rounding errors. All methods are applied to the Cache County Study to examine mother–child and sibship associations in dementia among this aging population, where the event times are rounded to the nearest integers. The modified U performs consistently with our simulation results and provides more reliable results in the presence of tied events.


Author(s):  
Xiaolin Chen ◽  
Chenguang Li ◽  
Tao Zhang ◽  
Zhenlong Gao

Biometrics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Nevo ◽  
Deborah Blacker ◽  
Eric B. Larson ◽  
Sebastien Haneuse

Author(s):  
Elliott S. Chiu ◽  
Sue VandeWoude

Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) serve as markers of ancient viral infections and provide invaluable insight into host and viral evolution. ERVs have been exapted to assist in performing basic biological functions, including placentation, immune modulation, and oncogenesis. A subset of ERVs share high nucleotide similarity to circulating horizontally transmitted exogenous retrovirus (XRV) progenitors. In these cases, ERV–XRV interactions have been documented and include ( a) recombination to result in ERV–XRV chimeras, ( b) ERV induction of immune self-tolerance to XRV antigens, ( c) ERV antigen interference with XRV receptor binding, and ( d) interactions resulting in both enhancement and restriction of XRV infections. Whereas the mechanisms governing recombination and immune self-tolerance have been partially determined, enhancement and restriction of XRV infection are virus specific and only partially understood. This review summarizes interactions between six unique ERV–XRV pairs, highlighting important ERV biological functions and potential evolutionary histories in vertebrate hosts. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 9 is February 16, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura L. Taylor ◽  
Edsel A. Peña

Author(s):  
Sarah Knuckey ◽  
Joshua D. Fisher ◽  
Amanda M. Klasing ◽  
Tess Russo ◽  
Margaret L. Satterthwaite

The human rights movement is increasingly using interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, mixed-methods, and quantitative factfinding. There has been too little analysis of these shifts. This article examines some of the opportunities and challenges of these methods, focusing on the investigation of socioeconomic human rights. By potentially expanding the amount and types of evidence available, factfinding's accuracy and persuasiveness can be strengthened, bolstering rights claims. However, such methods can also present significant challenges and may pose risks in individual cases and to the human rights movement generally. Interdisciplinary methods can be costly in human, financial, and technical resources; are sometimes challenging to implement; may divert limited resources from other work; can reify inequalities; may produce “expertise” that disempowers rightsholders; and could raise investigation standards to an infeasible or counterproductive level. This article includes lessons learned and questions to guide researchers and human rights advocates considering mixed-methods human rights factfinding. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simeon Floyd

Conversation analysis is a method for the systematic study of interaction in terms of a sequential turn-taking system. Research in conversation analysis has traditionally focused on speakers of English, and it is still unclear to what extent the system observed in that research applies to conversation more generally around the world. However, as this method is now being applied to conversation in a broader range of languages, it is increasingly possible to address questions about the nature of interactional diversity across different speech communities. The approach of pragmatic typology first applies sequential analysis to conversation from different speech communities and then compares interactional patterns in ways analogous to how traditional linguistic typology compares morphosyntax. This article discusses contemporary literature in pragmatic typology, including single-language studies and multilanguage comparisons reflecting both qualitative and quantitative methods. This research finds that microanalysis of face-to-face interaction can identify both universal trends and culture-specific interactional tendencies. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.


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