Abstract
In studies of disease with potential environmental risk factors, residential location is often used as a surrogate for unknown environmental exposures or as a basis for assigning environmental exposures. These studies most typically use the residential location at the time of diagnosis due to ease of collection. However, previous residential locations may be more useful for risk analysis because of population mobility and disease latency. When residential histories have not been collected in a study, it may be possible to generate them through public-record databases. In this study, we evaluated the ability of a public-records database from LexisNexis to provide residential histories for subjects in a geographically diverse cohort study. We calculated 11 performance metrics comparing study-collected addresses and two address retrieval services from LexisNexis. We found 77% and 90% match rates for city and state and 72% and 87% detailed address match rates with the basic and enhanced services, respectively. The enhanced LexisNexis service covered 86% of the time at residential addresses recorded in the study. The mean match rate for detailed address matches varied spatially over states. The results suggest that public record databases can be useful for reconstructing residential histories for subjects in epidemiologic studies.
Highlights
There are many uncertainties when conducting research in spatial epidemiology and environmental epidemiology
The spatial information is often the residential location, which is used as a surrogate for unknown environmental exposures or is used in environmental epidemiology to assign environmental exposures for potential risk factors of interest
The addresses started with the baseline address at the time of study enrollment, either 1995 or 1996 for subjects, and reflected address updates through 2013 as they became available from vendors who used the National Change of Address product from the United States Postal Service (USPS), which is based on the USPS change-of-address form data
Summary
There are many uncertainties when conducting research in spatial epidemiology and environmental epidemiology. Two major uncertainties are the location and timing of etiologically relevant environmental exposures that increase disease risk for individuals in a study population. In typical spatial analyses of epidemiologic data, the focus is on the location (e.g., where in space is risk elevated) with less consideration of the timing of the exposures (e.g., when and where in space was risk elevated). This is evident through the common use in risk analysis of spatial information that is related only to the time of study enrollment [1]. The inherent assumption is that time of study enrollment is the relevant time of environmental exposures, or that the study population is not residentially mobile over time so that the residential location at the time of study enrollment represents the relevant environmental exposures
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