Richard A. Kerber, Associate Professor

Epidemiologic research supports both basic investigation into disease etiology and public health goals related to disease prevention and control. We use the disease experience of large numbers of people to help us test hypotheses about the relationship of possible disease causes to observed outcomes, because it is often impossible to design experiments to test such hypotheses directly. A recurring challenge for epidemiologists is to design sophisticated statistical models that accurately represent the biological phenomena of interest, while at the same time reporting our research to the clinical community and the public in ways that do not lead to misunderstandings.

My current work is mostly concerned with identifying patterns of disease clustering within families, and with measuring the strength of familial disease aggregation. The major source of data for this research comes from the Utah Population Database (UPDB), which contains genealogical records linked to cancer registry data for a large number of Utahns. I am working on methods for efficiently measuring familial cancer risks that may be useful in several areas:
 

1. testing for the presence of genetic predisposition to some particular disease (e.g., cancer);
2. estimating the risk to relatives of a person diagnosed with a disease;
3. estimating the total proportion of a disease in which genetic predisposition plays a role;
4. estimating the number of interacting loci contributing to disease expression; and
5. identifying individual families carrying a predisposing allele.

Most of this research involves familial cancer studies, but I am also collaborating with researchers who are interested in the familiality of other phenomena such as autism, aging, and heart disease.

For models of familial disease aggregation to be useful, they must reflect the underlying genetic structure as accurately as possible with the available data. In order to evaluate the utility of alternative ways of studying familial cancer risks, I am currently using the pedigree information contained in UPDB as a background on which to simulate a variety of genetic predisposition syndromes and testing the ability of different methods to detect familial aggregation in each case.

Selected publications:

1. Kerber RA, et al (1993) A cohort study of thyroid disease in relation to fallout from nuclear weapons testing. JAMA 270,:2076-2082

2. Slattery ML and Kerber RA (1993) A comprehensive evaluation of family history and breast cancer risk: the Utah Population Database. JAMA 270:1563-1568

3. Slattery M and Kerber R (1994) Family history of cancer and colon cancer risk: the Utah Population Database. J Natl Cancer Inst 86(21):1618-1626

4. Kerber RA (1995) Method for calculating risk associated with family history of a disease. Genet Epidemiol 12:291-301

5. Elliott G, Alexander G, Leppert M, Yeates S and Kerber R (1995) Coancestry in apparently sporadic primary pulmonary hypertension. Chest 108:973-977

6. Slattery M, Mineau G and Kerber R (1995) Reproductive factors and colon cancer: the influences of age, tumor site, and family history on risk (Utah, United States). Cancer Causes Control 6(4);332-338

7. Kerber RA and Slattery ML (1995) The impact of family history on ovarian cancer risk: The Utah Population Database. Arch Intern Med 155:905-912

8. Slattery M and Kerber R (1995) The impact of family history of colon cancer on survival after diagnosis with colon cancer. Int J Epidemiol 24(5):888-896

9. Samowitz WS, Slattery ML and Kerber RA (1995) Microsatellite instability in human colonic cancer is not a useful clinical indicator of familial colorectal cancer. Gastroenterology 109:1765-1771

10. Kerber R and Slattery M (1997) Comparison of Self-Reported and Database-Linked Family History of Cancer Data in a Case-Control Study. Am J Epidemiol