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Revisiting the Association between Environmental Tobacco Smoke Exposure and Lung Cancer Risk

III. Adjustment for the Biasing Effect of Misclassification of Smoking Habits

P.N. Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd., Sutton, Surrey, UK

Barbara Forey

P.N. Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd., Sutton, Surrey, UK

John S. Fry

P.N. Lee Statistics and Computing Ltd., Sutton, Surrey, UK

Hackshaw et al. estimated that adjustment for bias due to misclassification of smoking habits reduces the ob served relative risk of lung cancer in non-smoking wom en associated with smoking by the husband from 1.24 to 1.18. This bias estimate is little affected by using an alter native method for misclassification adjustment or by using updated data from 47 studies rather than data from the 37 studies used by Hackshaw et al. The bias is increased if strong evidence of much higher misclassifi cation rates in Asian women is taken into account and could then explain about half the observed association. Misclassification correction has not previously been at tempted for dose-response data. We describe a suggest ed approach and apply it to data relating risk to amount smoked by the husband. As shown in paper II of this series the unadjusted increase in risk per 10 cigarettes/ day smoked by the husband is 10% (95% Cl 5 to 15%), reducing to either 6% (95% Cl 1 to 11 %) or 9% (95% Cl 5 to 14%) after adjustment for confounding by fruit, vege table and fat consumption and education using respec tively unweighted or weighted means to combine evi dence on the ETS/confounder association from different studies. Further adjustment for plausible levels of mis classification similarly reduced these two estimates to, respectively, 2% (95% Cl -3 to 8%) or 5.5% (95% Cl 0 to 11 %). Difficulties in applying misclassification bias cor rections are discussed. Other sources of bias will be con sidered in later papers in this series.

Key Words: ETS Lung cancer • Misclassification • Dose-response • .Meta-analysis

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