Racial and nonracial discrimination and tobacco use among high school students in California.

Background: The public health literature has established a relationship between discrimination, health outcomes, and health and well-being in adolescence. The objective of this study is to add vaping to the existing studies on discrimination and tobacco use among youth. To achieve this objective, the analysis examined the relationship between discrimination, type of discrimination, and current tobacco use, including current vape use, among adolescents in California.

Excess mortality and life-years lost in people diagnosed with depression: A 20-year population-based cohort study of 126,573 depressed individuals followed for 1,139,073 persons-years.

Depression is associated with premature mortality, but evidence is mainly derived from Western countries. Very limited research has evaluated shortened lifespan in depression using life-years-lost (LYLs), a recently developed mortality metric taking into account the illness onset for life expectancy estimation. Temporal trends of differential mortality gap are understudied.

An interactive dashboard for analyzing user interaction patterns in the i2b2 clinical data warehouse.

Background: Clinical data warehouses provide harmonized access to healthcare data for medical researchers. Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) is a well-established open-source solution with the major benefit that data representations can be tailored to support specific use cases. These data representations can be defined and improved via an iterative approach together with domain experts and the medical researchers using the platform.

Tracking provenance in clinical data warehouses for quality management.

Introduction: Data provenance, which documents the origin, history, and transformations of data, can enhance the reproducibility of processing workflows and help to address errors and quality issues. In this work, we focus on tracking and utilizing provenance information as part of quality management in Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes used to build clinical data warehouses.

Methods: We designed and implemented a framework that automatically tracks how data flows through an ETL process and detects errors and quality problems during processing.

Using a Bayesian analytic approach to identify county-level ecological factors associated with survival among individuals with early-onset colorectal cancer.

Background: In the United States (US), incidence of early age of onset colorectal cancer (EOCRC, diagnosed <50 years of age) has been increasing. Using a Bayesian analytic approach, we evaluated the association between county-level ecological factors and survival among individuals with EOCRC and identified hotspot and coldspot counties with unexplained low and high survival, respectively.

Methods: Principal component (PC) analysis was used to reduce dimensionality of 36 county-level social, behavioral, and preventive factors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.