Dataset Information

STATISTICAL METHODS FOR ANALYSIS OF COMBINED CATEGORICAL BIOMARKER DATA FROM MULTIPLE STUDIES.

ABSTRACT: In the analysis of pooled data from multiple studies involving a biomarker exposure, the biomarker measurements can vary across laboratories and usually require calibration to a reference assay prior to pooling. Previous researches consider the measurements from a reference laboratory as the gold standard, even though measurements in the reference laboratory are not necessarily closer to the underlying truth in reality. In this paper we do not treat any laboratory measurements as the gold standard, and we develop two statistical methods, the exact calibration and cut-off calibration methods, for the analysis of aggregated categorical biomarker data. We compare the performance of both methods for estimating the biomarker-disease relationship under a random sample or controls-only calibration design. Our findings include: (1) the exact calibration method provides significantly less biased estimates and more accurate confidence intervals than the other method; (2) the cut-off calibration method could yield estimates with minimal bias and valid confidence intervals under small measurement errors and/or small exposure effects; (3) controls-only calibration design can result in additional bias, but the bias is minimal if the exposure effects and/or disease prevalences are small. Finally, we illustrate the methods in an application evaluating the relationship between circulating vitamin D levels and colorectal cancer risk in a pooling project.

SUBMITTER: Cheng C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7903924 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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STATISTICAL METHODS FOR ANALYSIS OF COMBINED CATEGORICAL BIOMARKER DATA FROM MULTIPLE STUDIES.

Cheng Chao C Wang Molin M

The annals of applied statistics 20200918 3

In the analysis of pooled data from multiple studies involving a biomarker exposure, the biomarker measurements can vary across laboratories and usually require calibration to a reference assay prior to pooling. Previous researches consider the measurements from a reference laboratory as the gold standard, even though measurements in the reference laboratory are not necessarily closer to the underlying truth in reality. In this paper we do not treat any laboratory measurements as the gold standa ...[more]

PMID: 33633815

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Project description:Pooling biomarker data across multiple studies allows for examination of a wider exposure range than generally possible in individual studies, evaluation of population subgroups and disease subtypes with more statistical power, and more precise estimation of biomarker-disease associations. However, circulating biomarker measurements often require calibration to a single reference assay prior to pooling due to assay and laboratory variability across studies. We propose several methods for calibrating and combining biomarker data from nested case-control studies when reference assay data are obtained from a subset of controls in each contributing study. Specifically, we describe a two-stage calibration method and two aggregated calibration methods, named the internalized and full calibration methods, to evaluate the main effect of the biomarker exposure on disease risk and whether that association is modified by a potential covariate. The internalized method uses the reference laboratory measurement in the analysis when available and otherwise uses the estimated value derived from calibration models. The full calibration method uses calibrated biomarker measurements for all subjects, including those with reference laboratory measurements. Under the two-stage method, investigators complete study-specific analyses in the first stage followed by meta-analysis in the second stage. Our results demonstrate that the full calibration method is the preferred aggregated approach to minimize bias in point estimates. We also observe that the two-stage and full calibration methods provide similar effect and variance estimates but that their variance estimates are slightly larger than those from the internalized approach. As an illustrative example, we apply the three methods in a pooling project of nested case-control studies to evaluate (i) the association between circulating vitamin D levels and risk of stroke and (ii) how body mass index modifies the association between circulating vitamin D levels and risk of cardiovascular disease.

Dataset Information

STATISTICAL METHODS FOR ANALYSIS OF COMBINED CATEGORICAL BIOMARKER DATA FROM MULTIPLE STUDIES.

Publications

STATISTICAL METHODS FOR ANALYSIS OF COMBINED CATEGORICAL BIOMARKER DATA FROM MULTIPLE STUDIES.

Similar Datasets

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