Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Adult obesity prevalence at the county level in the United States, 2000–2010: Downscaling public health survey data using a spatial microsimulation approach
This study therefore, uses a spatial microsimulation approach to estimate obesity prevalence rates at the county level across the United States to visualize temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal changes from 2000 to 2010 for use in the monitoring of obesity prevalence. This method iteratively replicates the demographic characteristics of public health survey respondents with census data for those areas. Following, Local Moran's I was used to identify clusters of high and low obesity prevalence. The findings showed that obesity prevalence rose dramatically over the last decade with substantial variation across counties and ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Zero-augmented accelerated spatial failure model for modeling hospital length of stay data
Publication date: Available online 25 May 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal EpidemiologyAuthor(s): Cindy Xin FengAbstractHospital length of stay (LOS) is often used as an indicator for hospital efficiency and resource utilization. LOS is nonnegative with presence of zeros and typically positively skewed with a long right tail, which may not be adequately modelled by traditional distributions, such as lognormal. We developed a zero-augmented accelerated frailty model for modeling the extreme skewness with the presence of zeros. Levels of utilization of health services may vary geographically, so conditional autoregres...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Potential effects of climate change on the risk of accidents with poisonous species of the genus Tityus (Scorpiones, Buthidae) in Argentina
Publication date: June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 25Author(s): Pablo Ariel Martinez, Mayane Alves Andrade, Claudio Juan BidauAbstractThe temporal pattern of co-occurrence of human beings and venomous species (scorpions, spiders, snakes) is changing. Thus, the temporal pattern of areas with risk of accidents with such species tends to become dynamic in time. We analyze the areas of occurrence of species of Tityus in Argentina and assess the impact of global climate change on their area of distribution by the construction of risk maps. Using data of occurrence of the species and climatic var...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Editorial Board
Publication date: June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 25Author(s): (Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology)
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Integrating activity spaces in health research: Comparing the VERITAS activity space questionnaire with 7-day GPS tracking and prompted recall
ConclusionsThere is a spatial correspondence between destinations collected through VERITAS and 7-day GPS tracking. Both collection methods offer complementary ways to assess daily mobilities, useful to study environmental determinants of health and health inequities. (Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology)
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Gaining relevance from the random: Interpreting observed spatial heterogeneity
Publication date: June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 25Author(s): Rachel Carroll, Shanshan ZhaoAbstractIn Bayesian disease mapping, spatial random effects are used to account for confounding in the data so that reasonable estimates for the fixed effects can be obtained. Typically, the spatial random effects are mapped and qualitative comments are made related to an increase or decrease in risk for certain areas. The approach outlined here illustrates how a quantitative secondary assessment can be applied to make more useful and applicable inference related to these spatial random effects. We ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Gender and geographical inequalities in fatal drug overdose in Iran: A province-level study in 2006 and 2011
ConclusionRates of fatal drug overdose were higher among Iranian men and in both younger and older age groups which call for scaling up harm reduction and increasing access to gender- and age-specific substance use treatment services. (Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology)
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

A Bayesian latent process spatiotemporal regression model for areal count data
Publication date: June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 25Author(s): C. Edson Utazi, Emmanuel O. Afuecheta, C. Christopher NnanatuAbstractModel-based approaches for the analysis of areal count data are commonplace in spatiotemporal analysis. In Bayesian hierarchical models, a latent process is incorporated in the mean function to account for dependence in space and time. Typically, the latent process is modelled using a conditional autoregressive (CAR) prior. The aim of this paper is to offer an alternative approach to CAR-based priors for modelling the latent process. The proposed approach is b...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

A Bayesian spatio-temporal framework to identify outbreaks and examine environmental and social risk factors for infectious diseases monitored by routine surveillance
Publication date: June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 25Author(s): Aparna Lal, Jonathan Marshall, Jackie Benschop, Aleisha Brock, Simon Hales, Michael G Baker, Nigel P FrenchAbstractSpatio-temporal disease patterns can provide clues to etiological pathways, but can be complex to model. Using a flexible Bayesian hierarchical framework, we identify previously undetected space-time clusters and environmental and socio-demographic risk factors for reported giardiasis and cryptosporidiosis at the New Zealand small area level. For giardiasis, there was no seasonal pattern in outbreak probability and...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Temporal trends in physical violence, gender differences and spatial vulnerability of the location of victim's residences
This study performed an ecological-level longitudinal analysis, examining violence rates over 4 years. Cases of 4795 victims of physical aggression attended at a Center of Legal Medicine were investigated. Trend analysis was used to evaluate the data, with the creation of polynomial regression models (p < 0.05). Violence rates showed significant temporal variations according to sociodemographic characteristics of victims (p < 0.05) and the circumstances of aggressions (p < 0.05). Moreover, there was a significant increase in violence rate in the North (R2 = 16.1%; p = 0.019) and South (R2�...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Dynamics of dengue disease with human and vector mobility
Publication date: June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 25Author(s): Murali Krishna Enduri, Shivakumar JoladAbstractDengue is a vector borne disease transmitted to humans by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carrying virus of different serotypes. Dengue exhibits complex spatial and temporal dynamics, influenced by various biological, human and environmental factors. In this work, we study the dengue spread for a single serotype (DENV-1) including statistical models of human mobility with exponential step length distribution, by using reaction–diffusion equations and Stochastic Cellular Automata (SCA) a...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Spatially-explicit survival modeling with discrete grouping of cancer predictors
Publication date: Available online 21 June 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal EpidemiologyAuthor(s): Georgiana Onicescu, Andrew B Lawson, Jiajia Zhang, Mulugeta Gebregziabher, Kristin Wallace, Jan M. EberthAbstractIn this paper, the spatially explicit survival model is extended by allowing the relation with the explanatory covariates to be spatially adaptive using a threshold conditional autoregressive (CAR) model, further extended to allow the inclusion of multiple threshold levels. The model is applied to prostate cancer survival based on Louisiana SEER registry, which holds individual records linked to vital outcom...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Kernel density analysis reveals a halo pattern of breast cancer incidence in Connecticut
Publication date: August 2018Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 26Author(s): Natalya Rybnikova, Richard G. Stevens, David I. Gregorio, Holly Samociuk, Boris A. PortnovAbstractBreast cancer (BC) incidence rates in Connecticut are among the highest in the United States, and are unevenly distributed within the state. Our goal was to determine whether artificial light at night (ALAN) played a role. Using BC records obtained from the Connecticut Tumor Registry, we applied the double kernel density (DKD) estimator to produce a continuous relative risk surface of a disease throughout the State. A multi-varia...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Analysis of the spatial distribution of scientific publications regarding vector-borne diseases related to climate variability in South America
The objectives of this work were to analyze the distribution and abundance of publications on vector-borne diseases associated with climate variability in South America, identify those works that conducted a geographic analysis and detect the countries where outbreaks occurred and the climate variables with which they were associated. A systematic review of the literature published on vector-borne diseases linked to climate variability in South America was conducted, identifying, evaluating and summarizing scientific papers. The distribution of the study areas and disease type in the publications were represented on maps. ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

A multivariable assessment of the spatio-temporal distribution of pyrethroids performance on the sea lice Caligus rogercresseyi in Chile
In this study we explored the spatial and temporal variation of C. rogercresseyi’s response to pyrethroids in Chile from 2012 to 2013. We modeled lice abundance one week after treatment with a linear mixed-effects regression, and then we performed spatial and spatio-temporal cluster analyses on farm-level effects and on treatment-level residuals, respectively. Results indicate there were two areas where the post-treatment lice counts were significantly higher than in the rest of the study area. These spatial clusters remained even once we adjusted for environmental and management predictors, suggesting unmeasured factors...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - July 11, 2018 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research