Open AccessAdjustment for Urinary Creatinine or Serum Lipids for Analytes Assayed in Pooled Specimens
Author(s) -
Clarice R. Weinberg,
Min Shi,
Katie M. O’Brien,
David M. Umbach
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
epidemiology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.901
H-Index - 173
eISSN - 1531-5487
pISSN - 1044-3983
DOI - 10.1097/ede.0000000000001053
Subject(s) - pooling , creatinine , biomarker , analyte , urinary system , dilution , urine , computer science , statistics , chromatography , medicine , computational biology , chemistry , biology , mathematics , biochemistry , artificial intelligence , physics , thermodynamics
For case-control studies, pooling biologic specimens (cases with cases and controls with controls) can make it affordable to study a biomarker that is expensive to assay, while conserving quantities of archived specimens. For a fixed number of participants, pooling designs incur little loss of estimation precision, and they can even improve precision by enabling inclusion of more participants with the same number of assays. A limitation that has discouraged the use of these methods in environmental epidemiology, however, is the lack of a valid way to adjust for creatinine (urinary dilution) when assaying a biomarker in urine or to adjust for serum lipids when assaying a lipophilic biomarker in serum. We aimed to develop practical strategies to accomplish those adjustments.