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Software for studies of disease heterogeneity

  • %contrasttest: The %contrasttest macro conducts heterogeneity test for comparing the exposure-disease associations obtained from separate subtype-specific analysis based on the cohort or nested case-control studies.
  • %meta_subtype_trend: The %meta subtype trend macro tests whether the exposure-subtype association has a trend across the ordinal cancer subtypes. The user runs separate Cox (for cohort studies) or conditional logistic models (for nested case-control studies) for each subtype, and then tests the heterogeneity hypothesis using the outputs from the separate models, or the user takes the estimates (and standard errors) from the literature and test the heterogeneity hypothesis. In the subtype-specific analysis, the confounders-disease associations are allowed to be different among the subtypes.
  • %stepmetareg: A meta-regression method that can utilize existing statistical software for mixed model analysis. This method can be used to assess whether the exposure-subtype associations are different across subtypes defined by one marker while controlling for other markers, and to evaluate whether the difference in exposure-subtype association across subtyped defined by one marker depends on any other markers.
  • %subtype: Macro to examine whether the effects of the exposure vary by subtypes of a disease. It can be applied to data from the cohort studies, nested or matched case-control studies, unmatched case-control studies and case-case studies