The availability of familial structures or genealogies for large numbers of individuals within the population is crucial in the identification of familial clustering of disease or outcome. Family records are linked to cancer records, death certificates, birth certificates, Health Care Financing Administration records, and other clinical records; the resulting linked data sets provide a rich resource of information for genetic, epidemiological, demographic, and public health studies. The Utah Population Database (UPDB) is such a resource and much of the unique value of the database to the bio-medical research community stems from its interconnection of otherwise unlinked data sets, beginning with the core pedigree data showing familial relationships.
Studies of genetic epidemiology and demography often center on the need to have large number of individuals from a population-based resource or who represent a known segment of a population. Use of UPDB facilitates this research by providing information from three sets of records that are population-based and another set that is representative of about seventy percent of the Utah population.
In 1994, I began the Pedigree and Population Resource to provide ongoing management and development of the UPDB with support provided through the Huntsman Cancer Institute. My group is concentrating on two major areas of development. First, we are extending the kinship relations in UPDB by incorporating 1.2 million Utah birth certificates. Second, we are developing a set of death certificates for the state of Utah that will span the period of 1904 through 1998. When these records are linked to family records, researchers will have access to the cause of death for many pedigree members born from the mid-1800s to present. This area of development is being accomplished through the joint effort of several federally funded research projects. The staff of this resource works collaboratively with a number of research projects; in particular, we support the pedigree analysis and data collection for the High Risk Breast Cancer Clinic and the Familial Colon Cancer Clinic.
My long-term research interest in the area of demography is currently
focused on the study of kinship and socio-demographic determinants of mortality.
We are addressing questions:
How is an individual's risk of mortality affected by their connections
to their kinship network over time?
Are the effects of kinship networks on individual survival confounded
by factors that affect both the risk of mortality and kinship size, including
occupation, religious affiliation, migration history, urbanicity, and historical
period?
Is there evidence of correlated frailty within sibships, spouse pairs
or parent-child pairs?
Are estimates of frailty sensitive to different historical periods
characterized by the epidemiologcial transition?
Selected Publications:
Bean L, Mineau G, Smith K (1998) The longevity of married couples. In: Everyday Life in Pioneer Utah, (Walker R, ed) Provo, Utah:BYU Press
Mineau GP, Smith KR, Bean LL (1997) Has survival among widows and widowers improved? Trends from 1860-1960. Abstract In: Program from the Annual Meeting of Population Association of America, Washington D.C.
Smith KR, Mineau GP (1996) The relationship between parents' mortality and their childbearing patterns for marriage during 1860-1919. Abstract In: Program from the Annual Meeting of Population Association of America, New Orleans
Stephenson RA, Smart CR, Mineau GP, James BC, Janerich DT, Dibble RL (1996) The fall in incidence of prostate carcinoma: On the down side of a prostate specific antigen induced peak in incidence-data from the Utah Cancer Registry. Cancer 77:1342-1348
Slattery ML, Mineau GP, Kerber RA (1995) Reproductive factors and colon cancer: the influences of age, tumor site, and family history on risk. Cancer Causes and Control 6: 332-338
Janerich DT, Thompson WD, and Mineau GP (1994) Maternal pattern of reproductive and risk of breast cancer in daughters: results from the Utah Population Database. J Natl Cancer Inst 86(21):1634-1639
Janerich DT, Mineau GP, Kerber RA (1994) Gender of the first offspring, age at diagnosis, and survival with breast cancer (Utah, United States). Cancer Causes and Control 5:26-30
Bean LL, Mineau GP, Anderton DL. (1992) High risk childbearing: fertility and infant mortality on the American frontier. Social Science History 16:337-363
Bean LL, Mineau GP, Anderton DL. (1990) Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation. University of California Press
Mineau GP, Anderton DL, Bean LL. (1989) Description and evaluation of the linkage of the 1880 census to family genealogies with implications for Utah fertility research. Historical Methods 22:144-157