An exploratory analysis of large health cohort study using Bayesian networks

Large health cohort studies are among the most effective ways in studying the causes, treatments and outcomes of diseases by systematically collecting a wide range of data over long periods. The wealth of data in such studies may yield important results in addition to the already numerous findings, especially when subjected to newer analytical methods. Bayesian Networks (BN) provide a relatively new method of representing uncertain relationships among variables, using the tools of probability and graph theory, and have been widely used in analyzing dependencies and the interplay between variables. We used BN to perform an exploratory analysis on a rich collection of data from one large health cohort study, the Nurses' Health Study (NHS), with the focus on breast cancer. We explored the data from the NHS using BN to look for breast cancer risk factors, including a group of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNP). We found no association between the SNPs and breast cancer, but found a dependency between clomid and breast cancer. We evaluated clomid as a potential riskfactor after matching on age and number of children. Our results showed for clomid an increased risk of estrogen receptor positive breast cancer (odds ratio 1.52, 95% CI 1.11-2.09) and a decreased risk of estrogen receptor negative breast cancer (odds ratio 0.46, 95% CI 0.22-0.97).

Department dc:contributor.department

Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Shen, Delin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Peter Szolovits.

• Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34478
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/34478

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34478