[Todos] Conferencia del Prof. Camil Fuchs

[Vera H.]

El  INSTITUTO DE CALCULO  invita a la

Conferencia del Profesor Camil Fuchs

Department of Statistics and Operations Research,
Beverley and Raymond Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, 
Tel-Aviv

el dia Jueves 24 de Junio a las 16 hs. :

. "LIFETIME MORBID RISKS IN FAMILY STUDIES: CLASSICAL METHODS AND A NEW MODEL"


ABSTRACT
Family studies routinely assess the lifetime morbid risks of various diseases 
of the relatives of probands affected either by the target disease or by other 
related disorders.  
In family studies reported in the psychiatric literature, lifetime morbid risks 
are usually determined either by methods originally designed for analyzing life 
tables, such as the Kaplan-Meier product limit estimator and Cox proportional 
hazards model, or by simpler estimators such as the Weinberg abridged method, 
or by the Stromgren method which can be considered an elaboration of the 
Weinberg abridged method. In other cases, the lifetime morbid risks are 
assessed by the unadjusted proportion of the affected in the sample (known as 
the lifetime prevalence). 
We shall show that the use of the Kaplan-Meier product limit estimator for the 
estimation of lifetime morbid risk may yield unreliable estimates. Furthermore, 
while the simplicity of the Stromgren method and the Weinberg abridged method 
is appealing, we suggest that under a proper model, those methods can be 
replaced by an equally simple statistic, which is shown to be more accurate 
both on the average as well in the great majority of the specific cases. The 
increased accuracy is achieved particularly when the investigators have some 
prior indication regarding distribution of the ages at onset for those affected 
by the disorder.



Instituto de Calculo
Fac. de Cs. Exactas y Naturales
Pabellón II, 2do. Piso 
Ciudad Universitaria 

Jueves 24 de Junio de 2004
a las 16 hs. 
TE: 4 576-3375

QUEDAN   TODOS   CORDIALMENTE   INVITADOS

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