Biostatistics Seminar: Ross Prentice
DATE: Tuesday, November 12th, 2013
TIME: 4:10pm
LOCATION: Mathematical Sciences Building 1147
SPEAKER: Ross L. Prentice, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington
TITLE: The Women’s Health Initiative: history, contributions and on-going research
ABSTRACT:
The Women’s Health Initiative was launched in 1992 following some years of developmental work. It enrolled 161,808 healthy postmenopausal women at 40 U.S. clinical centers. A randomized, controlled trial among 68,132 such women examined the health effects of postmenopausal hormone therapy, a low-fat eating pattern, and calcium and vitamin D supplementation, in a partial factorial design. The remaining 93,676 women enrolled in a prospective cohort study. The hormone therapy component led to a greatly reduced use of these preparations, nationally and internationally, especially combined estrogen plus progestin therapy. The diet/nutrition components gave less influential results, but stimulated additional research on the use of dietary exposure biomarkers to strengthen nutritional epidemiology research. These topics will be summarized, along with a brief description of on-going WHI research activities and some comments on the population science research agenda more generally.