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Small-area based smoothing method for cancer risk mapping
This article describes – with real-data examples – a mapping method developed in Finland for such visualization but also utilized for data from numerous other countries and non-cancer outcomes. The Finnish smoothing is based on weighting small-area specific observations with population sizes and distance without losing the interpretability of the values. The approach has essentially improved the readability of spatio-temporal trends of incidence and mortality rates of cancers and has been applied in many studies. With help of the tool, decision makers can understand the key message of existing data and use it more effe...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - June 3, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Geographical clustering of incident acute myocardial infarction in Denmark: a spatial analysis approach
Conclusions : AMI is geographically unequally distributed throughout Denmark and determinants of these geographical patterns might include individual- and neighborhood-level sociodemographic factors. (Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology)
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - June 3, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Uncertainty in maternal exposures to ambient PM2.5 and benzene during pregnancy: sensitivity to exposure estimation decisions
Publication date: Available online 13 May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Jean Paul Tanner, Jason L. Salemi, Amy L. Stuart, Haofei Yu, Melissa M. Jordan, Chris DuClos, Philip Cavicchia, Jane A. Correia, Sharon M. Watkins, Russell S. Kirby We investigate uncertainty in estimates of pregnant women's exposure to ambient PM2.5 and benzene derived from central-site monitoring data. Through a study of live births in Florida during 2000-2009, we discuss the selection of spatial and temporal scales of analysis, limiting distances, and aggregation method. We estimate exposure ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - May 13, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Stepwise and stagewise approaches for spatial cluster detection
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 17 Author(s): Jiale Xu, Ronald E. Gangnon Spatial cluster detection is an important tool in many areas such as sociology, botany and public health. Previous work has mostly taken either a hypothesis testing framework or a Bayesian framework. In this paper, we propose a few approaches under a frequentist variable selection framework for spatial cluster detection. The forward stepwise methods search for multiple clusters by iteratively adding currently most likely cluster while adjusting for the effects of previously identified cluster...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - May 12, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Joint modelling of Anaemia and Malaria in children under five in Nigeria
Publication date: Available online 11 May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Samson B. Adebayo, Ezra Gayawan, Christian Heumann, Christian Seiler Malaria and anaemia which jointly account for high proportion of morbidity and mortality among young children in developing countries have been individually studied using binary regression model. We adopt geoadditive latent variable model for binary/ordinal indicators to analyze the influence of variables of different types on the morbidity among young children in Nigeria. Latent variable models allow for the analysis of multidimensional r...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - May 11, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

An analysis of temporal and spatial patterns in Italian hospitalization rates for multiple diagnosis
Publication date: Available online 3 May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Michela Cameletti, Francesco Finazzi In this paper, the Italian hospitalization database provided by the Ministry of Health is analyzed in terms of the temporal and spatial patterns of the hospitalization rates. The database covers the period 2010-2012 and the rates are evaluated for 110 Italian provinces and 18 diagnosis groups as defined by the ICD-9 classification. Tha analysis is based on a novel model-based clustering approach which enables clustering of spatially registered time series with respect to late...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - May 5, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Exploring spatial patterns in the associations between local AIDS incidence and socioeconomic and demographic variables in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Publication date: Available online 4 May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): André TJ Alves, Flavio F. Nobre, Lance A Waller Access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), universally provided in Brazil since 1996, resulted in a reduction in overall morbidity and mortality due to AIDS or AIDS-related complications, but in some municipalities of Rio de Janeiro, AIDS incidence remains high. Public health surveillance remains an invaluable tool for understanding current AIDS epidemiologic patterns and local socioeconomic and demographic factors associated with increased incidence. Geographicall...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - May 5, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Spatial Data Aggregation for Spatio-Temporal Individual-Level Models of Infectious Disease Transmission
Publication date: Available online 6 May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Lorna E. Deeth, Rob Deardon A class of complex statistical models, known as individual-level models, have been effectively used to model the spread of infectious diseases. These models are often fitted within a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo framework, which can have a significant computational expense due to the complex nature of the likelihood function associated with this class of models. Increases in population size or duration of the modeled epidemic can contribute to this computational burden. Here, we ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - May 5, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Hantavirus seropositivity in rodents in relation to habitat heterogeneity in human-shaped landscapes of Southeast Asia
Publication date: May 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, Volume 17 Author(s): Kim Blasdell, Serge Morand, Heikki Henttonen, Annelise Tran, Philippe Buchy To establish how the conversion of natural habitats for agricultural purposes may impact the distribution of hantaviruses in Southeast Asia, we tested how habitat structure affects hantavirus infection prevalence of common murine rodents that inhabit human-dominated landscapes in this region. For this, we used geo-referenced data of rodents analysed for hantavirus infection and land cover maps produced for the seven study sites in Thailand...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 30, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Identifying Spatial Data Availability and Spatial Data Needs for Chagas Disease Mitigation in South America
The objective of this paper on Chagas disease is to determine the availability and spatial resolution of existing data that can be used to address Chagas disease transmission risk in South America. A literature review was conducted to determine prominent variables that models utilize to assist with efforts to mitigate Chagas disease. Next, a Web search was performed to collect publicly available spatial data pertaining to these variables for the countries in South America. The data were classified based on type and spatial extent, which were then used to create maps of data availability of variables related to Chagas disea...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 29, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Non-stationary spatio-temporal modeling of traffic-related pollutants in near-road environments
Publication date: Available online 28 April 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Owais Gilani, Veronica J. Berrocal, Stuart Batterman A problem often encountered in environmental epidemiological studies assessing the health effects associated with ambient exposure to air pollution is the spatial misalignment between monitors’ locations and subjects’ actual residential locations. Several strategies have been adopted to circumvent this problem and estimate pollutants concentrations at unsampled sites, including spatial statistical or geostatistical models that rely on the assumption o...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 28, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Air Pollution is associated with Primary Health Care visits for Asthma in Sweden: A Case-Crossover Design with A Distributed lag Non-linear Model
Conclusion Even though the air quality in Scania between 2005 and 2010 was within EU's guidelines, the number of PHC visits for asthma increased with increasing levels of air pollution. This suggests that as well as increasing hospital and emergency room visits, air pollution increases the burden on PHC due to milder symptoms of asthma. (Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology)
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 28, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Geographically weighted discriminant analysis of environmental conditions associated with Rift Valley fever outbreaks in South Africa
This study compares the classification performance of GWDA and traditional DA when used to distinguish between locations where livestock are at risk or are not at risk for acquiring RVF virus (RVFV) using 699 case reports of RVF (affecting 18,894 animals) from two outbreaks in South Africa in 2008-2009 and 2010-2011. GWDA produced better results than traditional DA for all bandwidth and kernel combinations. The best GWDA model correctly classified 96.6% of the original data versus 84.5% obtained with traditional DA. With GWDA, false positives decreased from 10.9% to 3.7%, and false negatives decreased from 19.9% to 3.2%. ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 28, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Modelling collinear and spatially correlated data
Publication date: Available online 27 April 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Silvia Liverani, Aurore Lavigne, Marta Blangiardo In this work we present a statistical approach to distinguish and interpret the complex relationship between several predictors and a response variable at the small area level, in the presence of i) high correlation between the predictors and ii) spatial correlation for the response. Covariates which are highly correlated create collinearity problems when used in a standard multiple regression model. Many methods have been proposed in the literature to addre...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 27, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research

Hantavirus seroposivity in rodents in relation to habitat heterogeneity in human-shaped landscapes of Southeast Asia
Publication date: Available online 22 April 2016 Source:Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology Author(s): Kim Blasdell, Serge Morand, Heikki Henttonen, Annelise Tran, Philippe Buchy To establish how the conversion of natural habitats for agricultural purposes may impact the distribution of hantaviruses in Southeast Asia, we tested how habitat structure affects hantavirus infection prevalence of common murine rodents that inhabit human-dominated landscapes in this region. For this, we used geo-referenced data of rodents analyzed for hantavirus infection and land cover maps produced for the seven study sites ...
Source: Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology - April 26, 2016 Category: Epidemiology Source Type: research