So Young Park and Marcela Alfaro-Cordoba, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/138b/0034acbb0e0cefbb7146c5634f323efeaae4.pdf
ABSTRACT
Stomach cancer, or gastric cancer, refers to cancer arising from any part of the stomach. It causes about 800,000 deaths worldwide per year. Gastric cancer (GC) is the leading cause of cancer-related mortality in Costa Rican males. After breast cancer, it is the second highest cause of cancer mortality in women in Costa Rica. Most predictor variables have been based on epidemiological and social factors, yet spatial factors have not been commonly accounted in the analysis. In epidemiology, the prevalence of a health-related state (in this case, GC) in a statistical population is defined as the total number of cases in the population, divided by the number of individuals in the population. It is used as an estimate of how common a disease is within a population over a certain period of time. It helps health professionals understand the probability of certain diagnoses and is routinely used by epidemiologists, health care providers, government agencies and insurers. The objective of this analysis is to identify if there exists a spatial variation of GC in Costa Rica after accounting social factors, and to propose a possible methodology that can be imposed to improve future public health efforts for decreasing such prevalence. Using SAS, we construct a geographical representation of variables by county, and analyze residuals from a regression that links the social factors to GC to test the existence of spatial correlations.
The files needed to reproduce this article are:
Also, the R code to perform a spatial analysis is included in: