We propose a new data-augmentation strategy for fully Bayesian inference in models with binomial likelihoods. The approach appeals to a new class of Pólya–Gamma distributions, which are constructed ...in detail. A variety of examples are presented to show the versatility of the method, including logistic regression, negative binomial regression, nonlinear mixed-effect models, and spatial models for count data. In each case, our data-augmentation strategy leads to simple, effective methods for posterior inference that (1) circumvent the need for analytic approximations, numerical integration, or Metropolis–Hastings; and (2) outperform other known data-augmentation strategies, both in ease of use and in computational efficiency. All methods, including an efficient sampler for the Pólya–Gamma distribution, are implemented in the R package BayesLogit . Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
The global burden of disease (GBD) studies have derived detailed and comparable epidemiological and burden of disease estimates for schizophrenia. We report GBD 2016 estimates of schizophrenia ...prevalence and burden of disease with disaggregation by age, sex, year, and for all countries.
We conducted a systematic review to identify studies reporting the prevalence, incidence, remission, and/or excess mortality associated with schizophrenia. Reported estimates which met our inclusion criteria were entered into a Bayesian meta-regression tool used in GBD 2016 to derive prevalence for 20 age groups, 7 super-regions, 21 regions, and 195 countries and territories. Burden of disease estimates were derived for acute and residual states of schizophrenia by multiplying the age-, sex-, year-, and location-specific prevalence by 2 disability weights representative of the disability experienced during these states.
The systematic review found a total of 129 individual data sources. The global age-standardized point prevalence of schizophrenia in 2016 was estimated to be 0.28% (95% uncertainty interval UI: 0.24-0.31). No sex differences were observed in prevalence. Age-standardized point prevalence rates did not vary widely across countries or regions. Globally, prevalent cases rose from 13.1 (95% UI: 11.6-14.8) million in 1990 to 20.9 (95% UI: 18.5-23.4) million cases in 2016. Schizophrenia contributes 13.4 (95% UI: 9.9-16.7) million years of life lived with disability to burden of disease globally.
Although schizophrenia is a low prevalence disorder, the burden of disease is substantial. Our modeling suggests that significant population growth and aging has led to a large and increasing disease burden attributable to schizophrenia, particularly for middle income countries.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and conduct disorder (CD) are common externalizing disorders. Despite previous research demonstrating that both are longitudinally associated with ...adverse outcomes, there have been no systematic reviews examining all of the available evidence linking ADHD and CD with a range of health and psychosocial outcomes.
Electronic databases (EMBASE, Medline, and PsycINFO) were searched for studies published from 1980 up to March 2015. Published cohort and case-control studies were included if they reported a longitudinal association between ADHD or CD and adverse outcomes with a minimum follow-up of 2 years. Outcomes with sufficient data were pooled in a random effects meta-analysis to give overall odds ratios (ORs) with corresponding 95% CIs.
Of the 278 studies assessed, 114 met inclusion criteria and 98 were used in subsequent meta-analyses. ADHD was associated with adverse outcomes including academic achievement (e.g. failure to complete high school; odds ratio OR = 3.7, 95% CIs 2.0-7.0), other mental and substance use disorders (e.g. depression; OR = 2.3, 1.5-3.7), criminality (e.g. arrest; OR = 2.4, 1.5-3.8), and employment (e.g., unemployment; OR = 2.0, 1.0-3.9). CD was associated with outcomes relating to academic achievement (e.g. failure to complete high school; OR = 2.7, 1.5-4.7), other mental and substance use disorders (e.g., illicit drug use; OR = 2.1, 1.7-2.6), and criminality (e.g. violence; OR = 3.5, 2.3-5.3).
This study demonstrated that ADHD and CD are associated with disability beyond immediate health loss. Although the analyses could not determine the mechanisms behind these longitudinal associations, they demonstrate the importance of addressing ADHD and CD early in life so as to potentially avert a wide range of future adverse outcomes.
Retinal vascular diseases are important causes of vision loss. A detailed evaluation of the vascular abnormalities facilitates diagnosis and treatment in these diseases. Optical coherence tomography ...(OCT) angiography using the highly efficient split-spectrum amplitude decorrelation angiography algorithm offers an alternative to conventional dye-based retinal angiography. OCT angiography has several advantages, including 3D visualization of retinal and choroidal circulations (including the choriocapillaris) and avoidance of dye injection-related complications. Results from six illustrative cases are reported. In diabetic retinopathy, OCT angiography can detect neovascularization and quantify ischemia. In age-related macular degeneration, choroidal neovascularization can be observed without the obscuration of details caused by dye leakage in conventional angiography. Choriocapillaris dysfunction can be detected in the nonneovascular form of the disease, furthering our understanding of pathogenesis. In choroideremia, OCT's ability to show choroidal and retinal vascular dysfunction separately may be valuable in predicting progression and assessing treatment response. OCT angiography shows promise as a noninvasive alternative to dye-based angiography for highly detailed, in vivo, 3D, quantitative evaluation of retinal vascular abnormalities.
Significance Retinal vascular diseases are a leading cause of blindness. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become the standard imaging modality for evaluating fluid accumulation in these diseases and for guiding treatment. However, fluorescein angiography (FA) is still required for initial evaluation of retinal ischemia and choroidal neovascularization, which are not visible in conventional structural OCT. The limitations of FA include poor penetration of fluorescence through blood and pigment, inability to determine the depth of the pathology due to its two-dimensional nature, and some uncommon but potentially severe complications. As a noninvasive three-dimensional alternative, OCT angiography may be used in routine screening and monitoring to provide new information for clinical diagnosis and management.
This paper studies the multiplicity-correction effect of standard Bayesian variable-selection priors in linear regression. Our first goal is to clarify when, and how, multiplicity correction happens ...automatically in Bayesian analysis, and to distinguish this correction from the Bayesian Ockham's-razor effect. Our second goal is to contrast empirical-Bayes and fully Bayesian approaches to variable selection through examples, theoretical results and simulations. Considerable differences between the two approaches are found. In particular, we prove a theorem that characterizes a surprising aymptotic discrepancy between fully Bayes and empirical Bayes. This discrepancy arises from a different source than the failure to account for hyperparameter uncertainty in the empirical-Bayes estimate. Indeed, even at the extreme, when the empirical-Bayes estimate converges asymptotically to the true variable-inclusion probability, the potential for a serious difference remains.
To evaluate three coronary artery calcification (CAC) scoring methods to assess risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) death and all-cause mortality in National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) participants ...across levels of CAC scores.
The NLST was approved by the institutional review board at each participating institution, and informed consent was obtained from all participants. Image review was HIPAA compliant. Five cardiothoracic radiologists evaluated 1575 low-dose computed tomographic (CT) scans from three groups: 210 CHD deaths, 315 deaths not from CHD, and 1050 participants who were alive at conclusion of the trial. Radiologists used three scoring methods: overall visual assessment, segmented vessel-specific scoring, and Agatston scoring. Weighted Cox proportional hazards models were fit to evaluate the association between scoring methods and outcomes.
In multivariate analysis of time to CHD death, Agatston scores of 1-100, 101-1000, and greater than 1000 (reference category 0) were associated with hazard ratios of 1.27 (95% confidence interval: 0.69, 2.53), 3.57 (95% confidence interval: 2.14, 7.48), and 6.63 (95% confidence interval: 3.57, 14.97), respectively; hazard ratios for summed segmented vessel-specific scores of 1-5, 6-11, and 12-30 (reference category 0) were 1.72 (95% confidence interval: 1.05, 3.34), 5.11 (95% confidence interval: 2.92, 10.94), and 6.10 (95% confidence interval: 3.19, 14.05), respectively; and hazard ratios for overall visual assessment of mild, moderate, or heavy (reference category none) were 2.09 (95% confidence interval: 1.30, 4.16), 3.86 (95% confidence interval: 2.02, 8.20), and 6.95 (95% confidence interval: 3.73, 15.67), respectively.
By using low-dose CT performed for lung cancer screening in older, heavy smokers, a simple visual assessment of CAC can be generated for risk assessment of CHD death and all-cause mortality, which is comparable to Agatston scoring and strongly associated with outcome.
Climate Change and Mental Health: A Scoping Review Charlson, Fiona; Ali, Suhailah; Benmarhnia, Tarik ...
International journal of environmental research and public health,
04/2021, Volume:
18, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Climate change is negatively impacting the mental health of populations. This scoping review aims to assess the available literature related to climate change and mental health across the World ...Health Organisation's (WHO) five global research priorities for protecting human health from climate change. We conducted a scoping review to identify original research studies related to mental health and climate change using online academic databases. We assessed the quality of studies where appropriate assessment tools were available. We identified 120 original studies published between 2001 and 2020. Most studies were quantitative (
= 67), cross-sectional (
= 42), conducted in high-income countries (
= 87), and concerned with the first of the WHO global research priorities-assessing the mental health risks associated with climate change (
= 101). Several climate-related exposures, including heat, humidity, rainfall, drought, wildfires, and floods were associated with psychological distress, worsened mental health, and higher mortality among people with pre-existing mental health conditions, increased psychiatric hospitalisations, and heightened suicide rates. Few studies (
= 19) addressed the other four global research priorities of protecting health from climate change (effective interventions (
= 8); mitigation and adaptation (
= 7); improving decision-support (
= 3); and cost estimations (
= 1)). While climate change and mental health represents a rapidly growing area of research, it needs to accelerate and broaden in scope to respond with evidence-based mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Proximal algorithms are useful for obtaining solutions to difficult optimization problems, especially those involving nonsmooth or composite objective functions. A proximal algorithm is one whose ...basic iterations involve the proximal operator of some function, whose evaluation requires solving a specific optimization problem that is typically easier than the original problem. Many familiar algorithms can be cast in this form, and this "proximal view" turns out to provide a set of broad organizing principles for many algorithms useful in statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we show how a number of recent advances in this area can inform modern statistical practice. We focus on several main themes: (1) variable splitting strategies and the augmented Lagrangian; (2) the broad utility of envelope (or variational) representations of objective functions; (3) proximal algorithms for composite objective functions; and (4) the surprisingly large number of functions for which there are closed-form solutions of proximal operators. We illustrate our methodology with regularized Logistic and Poisson regression incorporating a nonconvex bridge penalty and a fused lasso penalty. We also discuss several related issues, including the convergence of nondescent algorithms, acceleration and optimization for nonconvex functions. Finally, we provide directions for future research in this exciting area at the intersection of statistics and optimization.
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