Beyond Self-Reports: Changes in Biomarkers as Predictors of Mortality

Dana A. Glei, Noreen Goldman, Germán Rodríguez and Maxine Weinstein

Population and Development Review, 2014, vol. 40, issue 2, 331-360

Abstract: type="main">

The proliferation of biosocial surveys has increased the importance of weighing the costs and benefits of adding biomarker collection to population-based surveys. A crucial question is whether biomarkers offer incremental value beyond self-reported measures, which are easier to collect and impose less respondent burden. We use longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of older Taiwanese (aged 54+ in 2000, examined in 2000 and 2006 with mortality follow-up through 2011) to address that question with respect to predicting all-cause mortality. A summary measure of biomarkers improves mortality prediction (as measured by the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) compared with self-reports alone, but individual biomarkers perform better than the summary score. We find that incorporating change in biomarkers over a six-year period yields a small improvement in mortality prediction compared with one-time measurement. But, is the incremental value worth the costs?

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2014.00676.x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:bla:popdev:v:40:y:2014:i:2:p:331-360

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0098-7921

Access Statistics for this article

Population and Development Review is currently edited by Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll

More articles in Population and Development Review from The Population Council, Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().