Statistical Approaches for Assessing Health Effects of Environmental Chemical Mixtures in Epidemiology: Lessons from an Innovative Workshop

Conclusions and Future Directions This workshop and its format were unique and novel in the field of environmental chemical mixtures and epidemiology, because participants were asked to conduct statistical analyses of specific model data sets and to compare their results to other statistical approaches. Based on the attendance, number of abstracts submitted, and enthusiastic discussion at the workshop, this format was successful in bringing statisticians and epidemiologists together to work on a common problem. The questions participants were asked to address in their analyses helped focus the discussion on the desired outcome—specifically, “Which exposures contributed to the outcome?” and “Are there any that did not?” Based on the results from the presentations and abstracts, a significant amount of variability between the methods was evident. Therefore, a useful future activity would be to systematically characterize the variation in results across methods that are sufficiently comparable to effect estimation and statistical significance. Based on the workshop discussions and comparisons across currently used methods, further development of methods is needed to adequately determine the health effects of mixtures and combined exposures. We encourage the ongoing use of the posted simulated data sets, to facilitate collaboration across environmental health disciplines and improve our understanding of the health impacts of chemical mixtures. References Aylward LL, Ki...
Source: EHP Research - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Perspectives Brief Communications December 2016 Source Type: research