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Berkson error adjustment and other exposure surrogates in occupational case-control studies, with application to the Canadian INTEROCC study

Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology volume 28, pages 251–258 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Many epidemiological studies assessing the relationship between exposure and disease are carried out without data on individual exposures. When this barrier is encountered in occupational studies, the subject exposures are often evaluated with a job-exposure matrix (JEM), which consists of mean exposure for occupational categories measured on a comparable group of workers. One of the objectives of the seven-country case-control study of occupational exposure and brain cancer risk, INTEROCC, was to investigate the relationship of occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) in different frequency ranges and brain cancer risk. In this paper, we use the Canadian data from INTEROCC to estimate the odds of developing brain tumours due to occupational exposure to EMF. The first step was to find the best EMF exposure surrogate among the arithmetic mean, the geometric mean, and the mean of log-normal exposure distribution for each occupation in the JEM, in comparison to Berkson error adjustments via numerical approximation of the likelihood function. Contrary to previous studies of Berkson errors in JEMs, we found that the geometric mean was the best exposure surrogate. This analysis provided no evidence that cumulative lifetime exposure to extremely low frequency magnetic fields increases brain cancer risk, a finding consistent with other recent epidemiological studies.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted in part while the first author was visiting the Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL) at the University of Barcelona in the fall of 2010. The authors are grateful to Jordi Figuerola at CREAL for his assistance in preparing the data files used in this paper. D. Krewski is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Chair in Risk Science at the University of Ottawa. J Siemiatycki holds the Guzzo-Cancer Research Society Chair in Environment and Cancer, at the Université de Montréal. The INTEROCC study was funded by the National Institutes for Health (NIH) Grant No. 1R01CA124759 (PI E. Cardis).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, Texas, USA

    Tamer Oraby

  2. Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Siva Sivaganesan

  3. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

    Joseph D Bowman

  4. College of Public Health and Human Services, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

    Laurel Kincl

  5. School of Public Health and Hospital Research Centre, University of Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Lesley Richardson & Jack Siemiatycki

  6. BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Mary McBride

  7. Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL), Barcelona, Spain

    Elisabeth Cardis

  8. McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Daniel Krewski

  9. Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

    Daniel Krewski

  10. Risk Sciences International, Ottawa, Canada

    Daniel Krewski

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  1. Tamer Oraby
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  2. Siva Sivaganesan
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  3. Joseph D Bowman
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  4. Laurel Kincl
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  5. Lesley Richardson
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  6. Mary McBride
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  7. Jack Siemiatycki
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  8. Elisabeth Cardis
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  9. Daniel Krewski
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On behalf of the INTEROCC Study Group

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Correspondence to Tamer Oraby.

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Competing interests

Dr Cardis is the principal investigator of the INTEROCC study, which is funded by the NIH. The authors declare no other conflicts of interest.

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DISCLAIMER

The findings and conclusions in this paper have not been formally disseminated by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy.

Supplementary Information accompanies the paper on the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology website

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Oraby, T., Sivaganesan, S., Bowman, J. et al. Berkson error adjustment and other exposure surrogates in occupational case-control studies, with application to the Canadian INTEROCC study. J Expo Sci Environ Epidemiol 28, 251–258 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2017.2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/jes.2017.2

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