A survey was planned to explore how estrogen receptor (ER) status of breast cancer was related to dietary and reproductive factors, in postmenopausal patients from Toronto. Unforeseeable circumstances created major delays and, even after enhancements of design, the number of subjects who could be included was seriously reduced. As statistical power had thus become undesirably low, emphasis is placed on the realities of epidemiologic research of this nature, i.e. how inevitable difficulties arise, have to be identified and, at the very least, mitigated. Despite small numbers, the odds of positive ER status were found to be low for patients with many pregnancies and high for those with one or two pregnancies, but intermediate for cases who had never been pregnant. This very strong association underlines the weaknesses of those with measured dietary intakes, which appear unlikely to be of major relative importance.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.75448 |
Date | January 1987 |
Creators | Rogers-Melamed, Iris |
Publisher | McGill University |
Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Format | application/pdf |
Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.) |
Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
Relation | alephsysno: 000547823, proquestno: AAINL44400, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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