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splitLexis

1 message · BXC (Bendix Carstensen)

#
Hi Dimitis,
You have a typo in the definition of the cohR Lexis object:

It should be   "age = doz-dob" ,  that is doz instead of doe.
No need to call the timescale "age1" either, it just produces trouble when putting the tables together for analysis.
I assume that doz is the date of screening.

A more serious concern is however the setup with 5-year time bands,
You should use smaller time bands now you have the possibility. In studies where you (at least pre-1970) were limited by population statistics to 5-year bands you were restricted to the assumption that breast cancer incidence was the same for women aged 45.5 and 49.5 years. And dramatically different for those aged 50.5.

Use instead 1-year time bands and assign each cell in the table the average age / date of follow-up, and analyze rates with some smooth function of these. When you actually have individual data you should exploit it.

You can of course replace "1 year" in the above by "3 months" (or even "17 days"); even if you have ages 30-95 and a 35 year period you are still only looking at 36400 cells, quite handy for analysis.

So use breaks=seq(35,95,1/4) instead.

Here is a full account of such analyses underlying a paper in Diabetologia on cancer among diabetes patients:
http://bendixcarstensen.com/DMCa/Diabetologia/Analyses.pdf
(Data here are actually in 1-year Lexis triangles).
p. 70 is an example of the type of model used.
The paper and other stuff is in the same folder.

b.r.
Bendix
______________________________________________

Bendix Carstensen 
Senior Statistician
Epidemiology
Steno Diabetes Center A/S
Niels Steensens Vej 2-4
DK-2820 Gentofte
Denmark
+45 44 43 87 38 (direct)
+45 30 75 87 38 (mobile)
bxc at steno.dk    
http://BendixCarstensen.com 
www.steno.dk