An overview of methods to address distinct research questions on environmental mixtures: an application to persistent organic pollutants and leukocyte telomere length.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Numerous methods exist to analyze complex environmental mixtures in health studies. As an illustration of the different uses of mixture methods, we employed methods geared toward distinct research questions concerning persistent organic chemicals (POPs) as a mixture and leukocyte telomere length (LTL) as an outcome.

Methods

With information on 18 POPs and LTL among 1,003 U.S. adults (NHANES, 2001-2002), we used unsupervised methods including clustering to identify profiles of similarly exposed participants, and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) to identify common exposure patterns. We also employed supervised learning techniques, including penalized, weighted quantile sum (WQS), and Bayesian kernel machine (BKMR) regressions,

SUBMITTER: Gibson EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6714427 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature