Anne-Claire Vergnaud1, Maria Aresu1, Håvard Wahl Kongsgård2, Dennis McRobie1, Deepa Singh1, Jeanette Spear1, Andy Heard1, He Gao1, James R Carpenter3, Paul Elliott4. 1. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom. 2. Faculty of Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway. 3. Medical Statistics Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine London, WC1E 7HT, United Kingdom. 4. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Imperial College London NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, London, United Kingdom; Health Data Research UK-London, London, United Kingdom. Electronic address: p.elliott@imperial.ac.uk.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Airwave Health Monitoring Study aims to investigate the possible long-term health effects of Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) use among the police forces in Great Britain. Here, we investigate whether objective data from the network operator could be used to correct for misreporting in self-reported data and expand the radio usage availability in our cohort. METHODS: We estimated average monthly usage of personal radio in the 12 months prior to enrolment from a missing value imputation model and evaluated its performance against objective and self-reported data. Factors associated with TETRA radio usage variables were investigated using Chi-square tests and analysis of variance. RESULTS: The imputed data were better correlated with objective than self-reported usage (Spearman correlation coefficient = 0.72 vs. 0. 52 and kappa 0.56 [95% confidence interval 0.55, 0.56] vs. 0.46 [0.45, 0.47]), although the imputation model tended to under-estimate use for higher users. Participants with higher personal radio usage were more likely to be younger, men vs. women and officer vs. staff. The median average monthly usage level for the entire cohort was estimated to be 29.3 min (95% CI: [7.2, 66.6]). CONCLUSION: The availability of objective personal radio records for a large proportion of users allowed us to develop a robust imputation model and hence obtain personal radio usage estimates for ~50,000 participants. This substantially reduced exposure misclassification compared to using self-reported data and will allow us to carry out analyses of TETRA usage for the entire cohort in future work. Crown
BACKGROUND: The Airwave Health Monitoring Study aims to investigate the possible long-term health effects of Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) use among the police forces in Great Britain. Here, we investigate whether objective data from the network operator could be used to correct for misreporting in self-reported data and expand the radio usage availability in our cohort. METHODS: We estimated average monthly usage of personal radio in the 12 months prior to enrolment from a missing value imputation model and evaluated its performance against objective and self-reported data. Factors associated with TETRA radio usage variables were investigated using Chi-square tests and analysis of variance. RESULTS: The imputed data were better correlated with objective than self-reported usage (Spearman correlation coefficient = 0.72 vs. 0. 52 and kappa 0.56 [95% confidence interval 0.55, 0.56] vs. 0.46 [0.45, 0.47]), although the imputation model tended to under-estimate use for higher users. Participants with higher personal radio usage were more likely to be younger, men vs. women and officer vs. staff. The median average monthly usage level for the entire cohort was estimated to be 29.3 min (95% CI: [7.2, 66.6]). CONCLUSION: The availability of objective personal radio records for a large proportion of users allowed us to develop a robust imputation model and hence obtain personal radio usage estimates for ~50,000 participants. This substantially reduced exposure misclassification compared to using self-reported data and will allow us to carry out analyses of TETRA usage for the entire cohort in future work. Crown
Authors: He Gao; Maria Aresu; Anne-Claire Vergnaud; Dennis McRobie; Jeanette Spear; Andy Heard; Håvard Wahl Kongsgård; Deepa Singh; David C Muller; Paul Elliott Journal: Br J Cancer Date: 2018-12-26 Impact factor: 7.640
Authors: Sharon A M Stevelink; Elena Opie; David Pernet; He Gao; Paul Elliott; Simon Wessely; Nicola T Fear; Matthew Hotopf; Neil Greenberg Journal: PLoS One Date: 2020-11-12 Impact factor: 3.240