A Bayesian Analysis of Racial Differences in Treatment among Breast-cancer Patients

B. Nandram, Dhiman Bhadra and Yiwei Liu

No WP2015-03-38, IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department

Abstract: It is a well known fact that race and ethnicity specificc variations exist in the treatment and survival of cancer patients. Studies based on breast cancer patients admitted to community hospitals in U.S depicted that there is significant difference in patterns of care between black and white breast cancer patients with blacks receiving lower quality and quantity of care. In this study, we look at this problem from a different perspective, treating the hospitals as small areas, and employing Bayesian techniques for parameter estimation. Two separate models are constructed to estimate the odds ratio of receiving liver scan (a pattern of care) for blacks and whites. The first model uses hospital-specific information while the second one uses pooled hospital data by borrowing strength from neighbouring hospitals. We have used the non-central hyper-geometric distribution as the basis for constructing the likelihood while estimation has been carried out using the griddy Metropolis-Hastings sampler. We apply our methodology on a National Cancer Institute (NCI) database. Although our results corroborate some of the observations from previous studies, it proposes a computationally attractive alternative to the established procedures in formulating and analyzing this problem.

Date: 2015-04-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-hea
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iima.ac.in/sites/default/files/rnpfiles/17700193172015-03-38.pdf English Version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iim:iimawp:13338

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IIMA Working Papers from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Research and Publication Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().