Optimal design strategies for sibling studies with binary exposures.

ABSTRACT: Sibling studies have become increasingly popular because they provide better control over confounding by unmeasured family-level risk factors than can be obtained in standard cohort studies. However, little attention has been devoted to the development of efficient design strategies for sibling studies in terms of optimizing power. We here address this issue in commonly encountered types of sibling studies, allowing for continuous and binary outcomes and varying numbers of exposed and unexposed siblings. For continuous outcomes, we show that in families with sibling pairs, optimal study power is obtained by recruiting discordant (exposed-control) pairs of siblings. More generally, balancing the exposure status within each family as evenly as possible is shown to be optimal. For binary outc

SUBMITTER: Li Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4412035 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature