The Biostatistics & Data Management core for The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer CenterProgram Project 'Mechanisms of Symptoms of Multiple Myeloma and Its Therapy' will providecomprehensive support for the planning and conduct of research implemented under this program. Thisresource will provide guidance for hypothesis testing and refinement, experimental design, implementationof clinical trials, data collection and management, data analysis, and data modeling. It will providestatistical expertise required for the preparation of reports summarizing program achievements. This corewill also support the development of innovative statistical methodology required for the analysis ofmultivariate mixed ordinal and continuous longitudinal data. This methodology will be based onhierarchical, joint longitudinal modeling of symptom response and neuropsychiatric, neurocognitive, andquantitative sensory variables as functions of an underlying state space. The framework developed as partof this research program will facilitate the analysis of missing data and joint modeling of both continuousand discrete data. Finally, this core will support the development, analysis, and interpretation ofpsychometric instruments designed for the measurement of cancer symptoms and treatment-relatedsymptom burden, and will apply multidimensional scaling and clustering methodology to identify groups ofsymptoms that occur concurrently with changes in cytokine-immunological activations.The specific, primary objectives of this core are as follows:1. To develop appropriate statistical models for the analysis of data collected under each of the programprojects.2. To develop and maintain a central database management system for integrating data across all projectsand cores.3. To provide descriptive analysis, hypothesis testing, estimation, and innovative statistical modelingneeded by the projects, developmental projects, and other cores to achieve their objectives.4. To ensure that the results of all projects are based on well-designed experiments and that the resultsfrom these experiments are appropriately interpreted.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 133 publications
