The ability of a study to identify cancer hazards is strengthened by "higher quality or higher specificity" exposure-assessment approaches that allow for a delineation of exposure potential to individual study subjects.
These issues include: case reports, study design, specificity of exposure, interview or recall bias, misclassification of occupation or exposure, confounding multiple exposures, confidence intervals and statistical power, selection of relevant studies, consistency of study results, study cohort definition, cohort membership misclassification, dilution effect, and subcohort or stratified analysis.
Greater specificity in exposure estimates is needed to further explore these associations.
Congener profiles indicated geographic specificity of exposure in Hong Kong, mainland China, and overseas Asian countries, including higher proportions of PCB-TEQs (overseas) and PCDF-TEQs (mainland China).
The resulting attenuation of odds ratios was substantially less for the "narrow" metric, further illustrating the importance of maximizing specificity when exposure prevalence is low.
Failure to include timing of pesticide application when studying congenital malformations may lead to decreased specificity for exposure and biased effect estimates (Savitz et al. 2002a).
Although imperfect sensitivity and specificity of exposure classification is possible, several studies that have recently evaluated the quality of ICD-10-based asthma diagnoses in the Danish National Registry of Patients have found the diagnosis codes to be accurate.
Using cases of IPV that are externally identified (e.g., by a clinician) would ensure more specificity of exposure classification but would likely identify only the most severe cases of abuse and would miss most of the exposed population.
Assessing indoor levels of TRAP through the collection and analysis of settled house dust is a new area of study and has the potential to reduce the misclassification and increase the specificity of exposure.
