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Modeling the Impact of Traffic-Related Air Pollution on Childhood Respiratory Illness

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Book cover Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Statistics ((LNS,volume 162))

Abstract

Epidemiological studies of the health effects of outdoor air pollution have suffered from a number of methodological difficulties. These include major problems of estimating exposure; confounding due to socioeconomic deprivation and other factors; failure to account for possible spatial dependence induced by unmeasured covariates with smooth spatial variation; and the potential for bias arising from approximation and aggregation in the data. We present a flexible modeling framework using recently developed Bayesian spatial regression methods to address some of these issues. We apply this approach to a study of the relation of London traffic pollution to the incidence of respiratory ailments in infants using the recently available Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) dataset.

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Authors
  1. Nicola G. Best
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  2. Katja Ickstadt
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  3. Robert L. Wolpert
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  4. Samantha Cockings
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  5. Paul Elliott
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  6. James Bennett
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  7. Alex Bottle
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Statistical Sciences, Brown University, Box G-A416, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Constantine Gatsonis

  2. Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall 229, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Robert E. Kass

  3. Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota, Box 303, Mayo Building, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Bradley Carlin

  4. Department of Statistics, Iowa State University, 222 Snedcor Hall, Ames, IA, 50011-1210, USA

    Alicia Carriquiry

  5. Department of Statistics, Columbia University, 618 Mathematics Building, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Andrew Gelman

  6. Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall 232, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Isabella Verdinelli

  7. Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences, Duke University, 214A Old Chemistry Building, Durham, NC, 27708-0251, USA

    Mike West

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Best, N.G. et al. (2002). Modeling the Impact of Traffic-Related Air Pollution on Childhood Respiratory Illness. In: Gatsonis, C., et al. Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics. Lecture Notes in Statistics, vol 162. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0035-9_3

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