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Published on: January 7, 2013
Partitioning linear trends in age-adjusted rates.
B F Hankey1, L A Ries, C L Kosary
1Cancer Statistics Branch, Cancer Surveillance Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-7352, USA. bh43a@nih.gov
Cancer Causes & Control : CCC
|February 19, 2000
Summary
This study introduces a method to break down overall chronic disease trends into specific disease contributions. This helps analyze the impact of interventions and risk factors on public health.
Area of Science:
- Epidemiology
- Biostatistics
- Public Health
Background:
- Chronic disease surveillance involves monitoring age-adjusted rates and trends.
- Understanding disease-specific contributions to overall trends is crucial for assessing interventions and risk factors.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a method for partitioning linear trends in age-adjusted rates into disease-specific components.
- To analyze the contribution of specific cancers to the overall decreasing trend in cancer mortality.
Main Methods:
- The study utilizes linear regression to partition trends.
- The method is demonstrated using age-adjusted cancer mortality rates in the United States from 1991-1996.
Main Results:
- Specific cancers, including colorectal, breast, lung, and prostate, accounted for 75% of the observed decrease in overall cancer mortality.
- The method allows for the quantification of individual disease impact on population health trends.
Conclusions:
- A linear regression-based method can effectively partition overall age-adjusted rate trends into disease-specific components.
- This approach is applicable when trends for the overall population and its subgroups are linear.
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