ArticleStatistics in medicine2013
A conceptual and methodological framework for investigating etiologic heterogeneity.
Article in Statistics in medicine, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Endothelial Collapse as a Convergent Immunovascular Phenotype in Sepsis and Severe Arboviral Disease: The SIMVAC Model.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Etiology of gene expression-based subtypes of breast cancer in the Ghana Breast Health Study.International journal of cancer · 2026Article
- Can We Interpret Analyses of Etiologic Heterogeneity When Molecular Markers Are Used to Classify Tumors?Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention : a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology · 2026Article
- Efficiency for evaluation of disease etiologic heterogeneity in case-case and case-control studies.The international journal of biostatistics · 2025Article
- Article
- Association between Family History of Breast Cancer and Breast Density in Saudi Premenopausal Women Participating in Mammography Screening.Clinics and practice · 2024Article
- Categorical and Dimensional Approaches for Psychiatric Classification and Treatment Targeting: Considerations from Psychosis Biotypes.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Genetic heterogeneity: Challenges, impacts, and methods through an associative lens.Genetic epidemiology · 2022Review
- Utility of Continuous Disease Subtyping Systems for Improved Evaluation of Etiologic Heterogeneity.Cancers · 2022Article
- TP53 Pathway Function, Estrogen Receptor Status, and Breast Cancer Risk Factors in the Carolina Breast Cancer Study.Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention : a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology · 2022Article
- Validity of a method for identifying disease subtypes that are etiologically heterogeneous.Statistical methods in medical research · 2021Article
- Subtypes of Preeclampsia: Recognition and Determining Clinical Usefulness.Hypertension (Dallas, Tex. : 1979) · 2021Review
- Premenopausal Breast Cancer Risk Factors and Associations with Molecular Subtypes: A Case-Control Study.International journal of breast cancer · 2021Article
- Evidence for Etiologic Subtypes of Breast Cancer in the Carolina Breast Cancer Study.Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention : a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology · 2019Article
- Metallic air pollutants and breast cancer heterogeneity.Environmental research · 2019Article
- Integration of microbiology, molecular pathology, and epidemiology: a new paradigm to explore the pathogenesis of microbiome-driven neoplasms.The Journal of pathology · 2019Review
- The competing risks Cox model with auxiliary case covariates under weaker missing-at-random cause of failure.Lifetime data analysis · 2018Article
- Integrative analysis of exogenous, endogenous, tumour and immune factors for precision medicine.Gut · 2018Review
- Utility of inverse probability weighting in molecular pathological epidemiology.European journal of epidemiology · 2018Article
- A comparison of statistical methods for the study of etiologic heterogeneity.Statistics in medicine · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cancer has traditionally been studied using the disease site of origin as the organizing framework. However, recent advances in molecular genetics have begun to challenge this taxonomy, as detailed molecular profiling of tumors has led to discoveries of subsets of tumors that have profiles that possess distinct clinical and biological characteristics. This is increasingly leading to research that seeks to investigate whether these subtypes of tumors have distinct etiologies. However, research in this field has been opportunistic and anecdotal, typically involving the comparison of distributions of individual risk factors between tumors classified on the basis of candidate tumor characteristics. The purpose of this article is to place this area of investigation within a more general conceptual and analytic framework, with a view to providing more efficient and practical strategies for designing and analyzing epidemiologic studies to investigate etiologic heterogeneity. We propose a formal definition of etiologic heterogeneity and show how classifications of tumor subtypes with larger etiologic heterogeneities inevitably possess greater disease risk predictability overall. We outline analytic strategies for estimating the degree of etiologic heterogeneity among a set of subtypes and for choosing subtypes that optimize the heterogeneity, and we discuss technical challenges that require further methodologic research. We illustrate the ideas by using a pooled case-control study of breast cancer classified by expression patterns of genes known to define distinct tumor subtypes.
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