AVVISO di SEMINARIO

["Carlo Gaetan" <gaetan@stat.unipd.it>]

      ESTIMATING HEALTH EFFECTS OF AIR POLLUTION:
Statistical Challenges, Findings, and Policy Implications

                      tenuto da
                
                 FRANCESCA DOMINICI  
            Department of Biostatistics
   Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

             14 novembre 2002 - ore 14.30
             15 novembre 2002 - ore 10.30
                     Aula CUCCONI

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                    ** ABSTRACT **                    

Evidence from time series studies of air pollution and health is 
central to major policy decisions concerning the risk of death
associated with air pollution exposure. The nature and characteristics of
time series data make risk estimation challenging, requiring
development of complex statistical methods able to detect effects that
are very small relative to the combined effects of confounders and
residual variation.

Using the National Mortality Morbidity Air Pollution Study, which
includes time series data from the 90 largest US locations for the period
1987-1994, we discuss: parametric versus semi-parametric approaches for
estimating city-specific relative risks; hierarchical models for
synthesizing city-specific estimates, and estimation of the
exposure-response relation between air pollution and mortality.

We report national-level estimates of the health effects of air
pollution, review their sensitivity to model choice and prior
distributions and discuss policy implications.

Sources of model uncertainty call for a systematic assessment of model
choice and for development of new methods. Importantly, the weight given
by this scientific evidence in setting policy requires a level of
confidence in findings that is difficult to attain in the small
effects/many potential confounders context, regardless of the
sophistication of the statistical approach.

joint work with: Trevor Hastie, Scott L. Zeger, Aidan McDermott, Jonathan
M. Samet

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Per informazioni

Patrizia Piacentini
Segreteria Organizzativa
segrorg@stat.unipd.it