Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Decline In Health For Older Adults: 5-Year Change In 13 Key Measures Of Standardized Health, Paula H. Diehr, Stephen M. Thielke, Anne B. Newman, Calvin H. Hirsch, Russell Tracy

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Introduction

The health of older adults declines over time, but there are many ways of measuring health. We examined whether all measures declined at the same rate, or whether some aspects of health were less sensitive to aging than others.

Methods

We compared the decline in 13 measures of physical, mental, and functional health from the Cardiovascular Health Study: hospitalization, bed days, cognition, extremity strength, feelings about life as a whole, satisfaction with the purpose of life, self-rated health, depression, digit symbol substitution test, grip strength, ADLs, IADLs, and gait speed. Each measure was standardized against self-rated health. We compared …

Significance Analysis Of Time Course Microarray Experiments, John D. Storey, Wenzhong Xiao, Jeffrey T. Leek, Ronald G. Tompkins, Ron W. Davis

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Characterizing the genome-wide dynamic regulation of gene expression is important and will be of much interest in the future. However, there is currently no established method for identifying differentially expressed genes in a time course study. Here we propose a significance method for analyzing time course microarray studies that can be applied to the typical types of comparisons and sampling schemes. This method is applied to two studies on humans. In one study, genes are identified that show differential expression over time in response to in vivo endotoxin administration. Using our method 7409 genes are called significant at a 1% …

Incorporating Death Into Health-Related Variables In Longitudinal Studies, Paula Diehr, Laura Lee Johnson, Donald L. Patrick, Bruce Psaty

UW Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Background: The aging process can be described as the change in health-related variables over time. Unfortunately, simple graphs of available data may be misleading if some people die, since they may confuse patterns of mortality with patterns of change in health. Methods have been proposed to incorporate death into self-rated health (excellent to poor) and the SF-36 profile scores, but not for other variables.

Objectives: (1) To incorporate death into the following variables: ADLs, IADLs, mini-mental state examination, depressive symptoms, body mass index (BMI), blocks walked per week, bed days, hospitalization, systolic blood pressure, and the timed walk. (2) To …