Skip Navigation



Biostatistics Advance Access published online on February 6, 2009
Biostatistics, doi:10.1093/biostatistics/kxn045
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Supplementary Material
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
10/2/390    most recent
kxn045v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Disclaimer
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Yang, Y.
Right arrow Articles by Longini, I. M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Yang, Y.
Right arrow Articles by Longini, I. M., Jr
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

A Bayesian model for evaluating influenza antiviral efficacy in household studies with asymptomatic infections

Yang Yang*

Program of Biostatistics and Biomathematics, Division of Public Health Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA yang{at}fhcrc.org

M. Elizabeth Halloran and Ira M. Longini, Jr

Program of Biostatistics and Biomathematics, Division of Public Health Sciences, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA 98109, USA and Department of Biostatistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Antiviral agents are an important component in mitigation/containment strategies for pandemic influenza. However, most research for mitigation/containment strategies relies on the antiviral efficacies evaluated from limited data of clinical trials. Which efficacy measures can be reliably estimated from these studies depends on the trial design, the size of the epidemics, and the statistical methods. We propose a Bayesian framework for modeling the influenza transmission dynamics within households. This Bayesian framework takes into account asymptomatic infections and is able to estimate efficacies with respect to protecting against viral infection, infection with clinical disease, and pathogenicity (the probability of disease given infection). We use the method to reanalyze 2 clinical studies of oseltamivir, an influenza antiviral agent, and compare the results with previous analyses. We found significant prophylactic efficacies in reducing the risk of viral infection and infection with disease but no prophylactic efficacy in reducing pathogenicity. We also found significant therapeutic efficacies in reducing pathogenicity and the risk of infection with disease but no therapeutic efficacy in reducing the risk of viral infection in the contacts.

Keywords: Asymptomatic; Bayesian; Influenza; Markov chain Monte Carlo

Received September 14, 2008; revised November 1, 2008; accepted for publication November 28, 2008.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.