International journal of epidemiology
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Comment Biography Historical Article
Commentary: In and out of asylums: mental health care of 19th century Scotland in the writings of Sir Arthur Mitchell, the Commissioner in Lunacy.
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To examine trends in the Arab-Jew life expectancy gap in Israel during 1975-2004 and to determine the contribution of age groups and causes of death to changes in the gap. ⋯ Following a period of reduction, the gap in life expectancy at birth between Arabs and Jews in Israel has started to widen. These findings indicate the need for increased attention to primary prevention and disease management in the Arab population. Reducing social and individual risk factors for major causes of death should be a national priority.
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The 'Mendelian randomization' approach uses genotype as an instrumental variable to distinguish between causal and non-causal explanations of biomarker-disease associations. Classical methods for instrumental variable analysis are limited to linear or probit models without latent variables or missing data, rely on asymptotic approximations that are not valid for weak instruments and focus on estimation rather than hypothesis testing. We describe a Bayesian approach that overcomes these limitations, using the JAGS program to compute the log-likelihood ratio (lod score) between causal and non-causal explanations of a biomarker-disease association. ⋯ The Bayesian approach described here is flexible enough to deal with any instrumental variable problem, and does not rely on asymptotic approximations that may not be valid for weak instruments. The approach can easily be extended to combine information from different study designs. Statistical power calculations show that instrumental variable analysis with genetic instruments will typically require combining information from moderately large cohort and cross-sectional studies of biomarkers with information from very large genetic case-control studies.