Joint quantile disease mapping with application to malaria and G6PD deficiency.

Area of Science:

• Biostatistics
• Epidemiology
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Traditional statistical methods for disease mapping often rely on mean regressions, which can be sensitive to outliers and less flexible.
• Joint disease mapping is crucial for understanding correlations between different diseases, but existing methods have limitations.
• The potential link between malaria and Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency highlights the need for advanced analytical tools.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel joint quantile regression framework for analyzing multiple interrelated diseases.
• To offer a more comprehensive, flexible, and outlier-resistant statistical approach compared to mean-based methods.
• To develop a disease mapping model capable of exploring correlations at various quantile levels.

Main Methods:

• Developed a joint quantile regression framework for multiple diseases, considering different quantile levels.
• Incorporated linear and nonlinear covariate effects using stochastic splines within a latent Gaussian model.
• Employed Bayesian inference with R's integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) for efficient analysis, suitable for large datasets.

Main Results:

• The proposed model provides a flexible framework for joint disease mapping using quantile regression.
• Demonstrated the model's applicability using data from 21 countries, highlighting its potential for analyzing complex disease relationships.
• The methodology allows for the investigation of disease correlations at various levels of the conditional distribution.

Conclusions:

• Joint quantile regression offers a superior statistical approach for disease mapping compared to traditional mean methods.
• The developed framework is adaptable for analyzing linear and nonlinear effects and is computationally efficient.
• Further research with more comprehensive data is needed to confirm significant relationships between diseases like malaria and G6PD deficiency.