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A Multifactorial Variant of the Attributable Risk for Groups of Exposure Variables
Author(s) -
Land Matthias,
Vogel Christine,
Gefeller Olaf
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
biometrical journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.108
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1521-4036
pISSN - 0323-3847
DOI - 10.1002/1521-4036(200108)43:4<461::aid-bimj461>3.0.co;2-z
Subject(s) - attributable risk , population , context (archaeology) , epidemiology , medicine , disease , risk assessment , environmental health , risk factor , demography , risk analysis (engineering) , geography , computer science , pathology , computer security , sociology , archaeology
Multifactorial approaches to risk attribution in epidemiology have been subject of intensive research activities in the last decade. In particular, the partial attributable risk parameter has been developed as a multidimensional measure of attributable risk that puts the task of quantifying a proportion of disease events in a population that can be ascribed to the adverse health effects of certain risk factors into a multifactorial perspective. The components of this parameter allow a consistent comparison of the impact of individual risk factors on the disease load in the population. However, they are not suited to compare groups of risk factors with respect to their specific combined population impact to each other reasonably. Therefore, the partial attributable risk is of rather limited applicability if an epidemiological study focuses, for example, on contrasting the total impact of multiple occupational exposures on the disease load in the population with the impact of multiple environmental or life‐style factors. This paper introduces a new grouped variant of the partial attributable risk parameter which can be applied to the multifactorial risk attribution problem in the context of multiple groups of risk factors. Its application is illustrated using data from the G.R.I.P.‐study (Göttingen Risk, Incidence and Prevalence Study).