About Mortality Research & Consulting, Inc.
Contact us for further information or to arrange a conference call or meeting.
Mortality Research & Consulting conducts research and offers comprehensive biostatistical and epidemiological consulting services. Our scientific research to date has focused largely on mortality, survival, life expectancy, and other human epidemiological topics. While our professional consulting has traditionally focused on life expectancy in the context of personal injury litigation, our expertise in both research and consulting is widely applicable across the domains of biostatistics, epidemiology, and general health research. Please contact us to discuss your project; initial consultations are always free.
Why mortality research?
Epidemiological research often concerns mortality, even if only indirectly. Research capital (human and otherwise) available for projects intent on understanding, preventing, and treating human disease is often directed preferentially to research on diseases that hasten mortality. Understanding patterns and determinants of human mortality is an essential part of medical research.
Furthermore, mortality must be accounted for in many longitudinal analyses that are not directly focused on it as an outcome. All longitudinal studies of human growth, development, or change may be influenced by the potential for and timing of death. For example, a study of factors affecting transition from job to job throughout life would be influenced by the mortality of workers during the period of follow-up. While in this sense death may be treated as a kind of censoring event (in the technical jargon of survival analysis), in other cases it may be an endpoint of interest in its own right. Finally, for a proper analysis of the likelihood of any particular outcome occurring (e.g., a change in jobs, a loss of independence, remission or onset of a disease), a thorough understanding of the methods for survival analysis is crucial.
Areas of research with which we have extensive experience include:
• Life expectancy
• Neurological disorders, injuries and developmental disabilities
> Cerebral palsy (CP)
> Traumatic brain injury (TBI)
> Spinal cord injury (SCI)
> Vegetative state (VS)
> Epilepsy
> Down syndrome (DS)
• Oncology
• Occupational epidemiology
• Environmental health
• Biostatistics
• Health services research
• Major League Baseball
Methods of analyses with which we have extensive experience include:
• Sampling techniques
• Measures of epidemiological effect: AR, PAR, AF, PAF, prevalence, incidence, RR, RD, OR, SMR
• Crude and adjusted mortality rates
• Standardized mortality ratios
• Life tables and life expectancy calculation
• Product-limit method of survival analysis (Kaplan-Meier survival analysis)
• Cox proportional hazards regression
• Parametric survival regression
• Aalen-Johansen estimator of multistate probabilities of transition
• Ordinary Least-Squares (OLS) regression
• Generalized linear models: Logistic, Poisson, and negative binomial regressions
• Generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape (GAMLSS)
• Box-Cox power exponential distributions
• Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) models and hurdle models
• Linear mixed models
• Generalized linear mixed models
• Hierarchical models
• Generalized estimating equations
• Principle components analysis
• Path models, factor analysis (FA), and full structural equation models (SEM)
• Latent class models
• Propensity score and instrumental variable analysis
• Bayesian analysis
• Statistical power analysis
See our CVs for more information about our published research and unpublished presentations at professional meetings. A list of our published research with links to full text or abstracts is also available here (Day SM) and here (Reynolds RJ).
Contact us for further information or to arrange a conference call or meeting.