Absolute Risk: Methods and Applications in Clinical Management and Public Health provides theory and examples to demonstrate the importance of absolute risk in counseling patients, devising public health strategies, and clinical management. The book provides sufficient technical detail to allow statisticians, epidemiologists, and clinicians to build, test, and apply models of absolute risk. Features: Provides theoretical basis for modeling absolute risk, including competing risks and cause-specific and cumulative incidence regression Discusses various sampling designs for estimating absolute risk and criteria to evaluate models Provides details on statistical inference for the various sampling designs Discusses criteria for evaluating risk models and comparing risk models, including both general criteria and problem-specific expected losses in well-defined clinical and public health applications Describes many applications encompassing both disease prevention and prognosis, and ranging from counseling individual patients, to clinical decision making, to assessing the impact of risk-based public health strategies Discusses model updating, family-based designs, dynamic projections, and other topics Ruth M. Pfeiffer is a mathematical statistician and Fellow of the American Statistical Association, with interests in risk modeling, dimension reduction, and applications in epidemiology. She developed absolute risk models for breast cancer, colon cancer, melanoma, and second primary thyroid cancer following a childhood cancer diagnosis. Mitchell H. Gail developed the widely used "Gail model" for projecting the absolute risk of invasive breast cancer. He is a medical statistician with interests in statistical methods and applications in epidemiology and molecular medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and former President of the American Statistical Association. Both are Senior Investigators in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Handbook of Statistical Methods for Case-Control Studies is written by leading researchers in the field. It provides an in-depth treatment of up-to-date and currently developing statistical methods for the design and analysis of case-control studies, as well as a review of classical principles and methods. The handbook is designed to serve as a reference text for biostatisticians and quantitatively-oriented epidemiologists who are working on the design and analysis of case-control studies or on related statistical methods research. Though not specifically intended as a textbook, it may also be used as a backup reference text for graduate level courses. Book Sections Classical designs and causal inference, measurement error, power, and small-sample inference Designs that use full-cohort information Time-to-event data Genetic epidemiology About the Editors Ornulf Borgan is Professor of Statistics, University of Oslo. His book with Andersen, Gill and Keiding on counting processes in survival analysis is a world classic. Norman E. Breslow was, at the time of his death, Professor Emeritus in Biostatistics, University of Washington. For decades, his book with Nick Day has been the authoritative text on case-control methodology. Nilanjan Chatterjee is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins University. He leads a broad research program in statistical methods for modern large scale biomedical studies. Mitchell H. Gail is a Senior Investigator at the National Cancer Institute. His research includes modeling absolute risk of disease, intervention trials, and statistical methods for epidemiology. Alastair Scott was, at the time of his death, Professor Emeritus of Statistics, University of Auckland. He was a major contributor to using survey sampling methods for analyzing case-control data. Chris J. Wild is Professor of Statistics, University of Auckland. His research includes nonlinear regression and methods for fitting models to response-selective data.

The AIDS epidemic has spread worldwide, and nearly 300,000 cases have been reported in the United States alone. Statisticians and epidemiologists are called upon to design and correctly interpret studies on the prevention and control of disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and to estimate the magnitude and future course of the epidemic. In addition to a comprehensive discussion of methods for gauging the extent of the epidemic and forecasting AIDS incidence, this book presents methods and results concerning the risks of HIV transmission, the incubation period of HIV infection, markers of disease progression, prevention strategies, including strategies to protect the blood supply, and the evaluation of treatments and vaccines. These topics are presented quantitatively, with an emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of available data. The book highlights how a naive statistical approach to the design or analysis of such studies can lead to seriously misleading results. The various methods of monitoring and forecasting HIV disease and AIDS incidence are given thorough treatment. These methods include back-calculation, which the authors developed; interpretations of survey data on HIV prevalence and incidence; mathematical models for HIV transmission; and approaches that combine different types of epidemiological data. Much of the material in this book - such as a discussion of methods for assessing safety of the blood supply. an evaluation of survey approaches and methods to project pediatric AIDS incidence - has not been previously published.

Absolute Risk: Methods and Applications in Clinical Management and Public Health provides theory and examples to demonstrate the importance of absolute risk in counseling patients, devising public health strategies, and clinical management. The book provides sufficient technical detail to allow statisticians, epidemiologists, and clinicians to build, test, and apply models of absolute risk. Features: Provides theoretical basis for modeling absolute risk, including competing risks and cause-specific and cumulative incidence regression Discusses various sampling designs for estimating absolute risk and criteria to evaluate models Provides details on statistical inference for the various sampling designs Discusses criteria for evaluating risk models and comparing risk models, including both general criteria and problem-specific expected losses in well-defined clinical and public health applications Describes many applications encompassing both disease prevention and prognosis, and ranging from counseling individual patients, to clinical decision making, to assessing the impact of risk-based public health strategies Discusses model updating, family-based designs, dynamic projections, and other topics Ruth M. Pfeiffer is a mathematical statistician and Fellow of the American Statistical Association, with interests in risk modeling, dimension reduction, and applications in epidemiology. She developed absolute risk models for breast cancer, colon cancer, melanoma, and second primary thyroid cancer following a childhood cancer diagnosis. Mitchell H. Gail developed the widely used "Gail model" for projecting the absolute risk of invasive breast cancer. He is a medical statistician with interests in statistical methods and applications in epidemiology and molecular medicine. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and former President of the American Statistical Association. Both are Senior Investigators in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health.