Initially, non-case individuals who were resident in households with an index case of disease were considered as contacts whereas those who were resident in non-case households were considered as non-contacts.
Antibiotic use in the month before onset of illness was also more common in non-case-patients, and symptoms in these persons may therefore be a side effect of antibiotic treatment.
For studies reporting only mean levels of ferritin in case and non-case subjects [ 12, 14], we used linear discriminant function methods [ 28] to calculate the OR in a comparison of the 75th to the 25th percentiles of the ferritin distribution in non-case subjects, assuming a normal distribution for ferritin.
Age-adjusted serum insulin and testosterone were also higher in cases than in non-cases.
Fasting insulin was three times higher in those with the metabolic syndrome than in non-cases.
The mean blood, tibia, and patella lead levels were higher in IHD cases than in non-cases.
There was a longer time since diagnosis in non-cases (mean=61 days) than in cases (mean=45 days).
1 Choosing a cut-point is a trade-off between harm of treatment in non-cases (overtreatment) and harm of no treatment in cases (undertreatment).
Patients in the cases group had more advanced FIGO stage (stage III or IV) and lower KP scores than those in non-cases.
In BC cases, we selected mammograms taken prior to diagnosis or from the contralateral breast, whereas, in non-cases, the last screening mammogram was evaluated.
The interaction between rs9358531 and current use of MHT on percent density was also similar in cases and non-cases (in cases: betaint = 0.28, 95 % CI 0.06, 0.51, Pint = 0.01; in non-cases: betaint = 0.21, 95 % CI 0.05, 0.37, Pint = 0.01; Pint SNP × MHT × case status = 0.60).
