Study Data from Health Canada Update Understanding of Risk Management (Meta-Analysis Methods to Estimate the Shape and Uncertainty in the Association…

Study Data from Health Canada Update Understanding of Risk Management (Meta-Analysis Methods to Estimate the Shape and Uncertainty in the Association Between Long-Term Exposure to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter and Cause-Specific Mortality ...)

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Weekly News -- Current study results on Risk Management have been published. According to news originating from Ottawa, Canada, by VerticalNews correspondents, research stated, "Estimates of excess mortality associated with exposure to ambient concentrations of fine particulate matter have been obtained from either a single cohort study or pooling information from a small number of studies. However, standard frequentist methods of pooling are known to underestimate statistical uncertainty in the true risk distribution when the number of studies pooled is small."

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from Health Canada, "Alternatively, Bayesian pooling methods using noninformative priors yield unrealistically large amounts of uncertainty in this case. We present a new hybrid frequentist-bayesian framework for meta-analysis that incorporates features of both frequentist and Bayesian approaches, yielding estimated uncertainty distributions that are more useful for burden estimation. We also present an example of mortality risk due to long-term exposure to ambient fine particulate matter obtained from a small number of cohort studies conducted in the United States and Europe. We compare our new risk uncertainty distribution to that obtained by the integrated exposure-response (IER) model used in the Global Burden of Disease 2010 project for which risk was modeled over the entire global concentration range."

According to the news editors, the research concluded: "We suggest a method to incorporate our new risk uncertainty distribution based on the relatively low concentrations observed in the United States and western Europe into the IER model, thus extending risk estimation to the global concentration range."

For more information on this research see: Meta-Analysis Methods to Estimate the Shape and Uncertainty in the Association Between Long-Term Exposure to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter and Cause-Specific Mortality Over the Global Concentration Range. Risk Analysis, 2016;36(9):1813-1825. Risk Analysis can be contacted at: Wiley-Blackwell, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Wiley-Blackwell - www.wiley.com/; Risk Analysis - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1539-6924)

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from R.T. Burnett, Hlth Canada, Populat Studies Div, Ottawa, ON K1A 0K9, Canada. Additional authors for this research include A.J. Cohen, C.A. Pope, M. Ezzati, S.S. Lim, B.J. Hubbell and R.T. Burnett.

Keywords for this news article include: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, North and Central America, Risk Management, Risk and Prevention, Health Canada.

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