This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Bowden, J. Articles by Whittaker, J. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

A latent variable scorecard for neonatal baby frailty

Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester, UK

Joe Whittaker

Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Lancaster University, UK, joe.whittaker{at}lancaster.ac.uk

A latent variable frailty model is built for data coming from a neonatal study conducted to investigate whether the presence of a particular hospital service given to families with premature babies has a positive effect on their care requirements within the first year of life. The predicted value of the latent frailty term from information obtained from the family in advance of the birth furnishes an overall measure of the quality of health of the baby. This identifies families at risk. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian approaches are used to estimate the effect of the variables on the value of the latent baby frailty and for prediction of health complications. It is found that these give much the same estimates of regression coefficients, but that the variance components are the more difficult to estimate. We indicate how the findings from the model may be presented as a scorecard for predicting frailty, and so be useful to doctors working in hospital neonatal units. New information about a baby is automatically combined with the current score to provide an up-to-date score, so that rapid decisions for taking appropriate action are made more possible. A diagnostic procedure is proposed to assess how well the independence assumptions of the model are met in fitting to this data. It is concluded that the frailty model provides an informative summary of the data from this neonatal study.

Key Words: community neonatal services • conditional independence • empirical Bayes prediction • frailty scorecard • GLLAMM • Hand and Crowder quality model • JAGS • MIMIC model • neonatal unit • premature birth

Statistical Modelling, Vol. 5, No. 2, 159-172 (2005)
DOI: 10.1191/1471082X05st093oa


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?