Fundamentals Epidemiology (EPID 610)

Week 8 Exercise
Hypothesis Testing

Learning Objectives
 Assess statistical significance using confidence intervals

Taenia solium (T. solium) is the larval stage of the pork tapeworm. Humans can become infected
with the larval stage of this parasite (the form usually infecting pigs) by ingesting tapeworm eggs
shed by other infected humans (fecal-oral route). In humans, T. solium typically invades central
nervous system tissue such as the brain.

You hypothesize that T. solium infection can lead to brain cancer. To test your hypothesis, you
recruit a cohort of 30 people with evidence of T. solium in their brain and 30 people without this
infection and follow them over 20 years to determine the risk of brain cancer. The data you
collected for this Cohort Study is available for analysis on blackboard, called “exercise 7
dataset.sav.”

1. What are the null and alternate hypotheses for the association between T. solium infection and
brain cancer risk?

2. What are the RR and 95% CI for the association between T. solium infection and brain cancer?

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 Fundamentals Epidemiology (EPID 610)

3. How do you interpret the RR and 95% CI?

4. What are the null and alternate hypotheses for the association between T. solium infection and
brain cancer odds?

5. What are the OR and 95% CI for the association between T. solium infection and brain
cancer?

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 Fundamentals Epidemiology (EPID 610)

6. How do you interpret the OR and 95% CI?

7. Do you think that T. solium infection causes brain cancer? Why or why not?

SPSS INSTRUTIONS

CROSSTAB FUNCTION:
 Go to ANALYZE and select DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS and the CROSSTABS
 Put the exposure in the ROW box and the outcome in the COLUMN box.
 Click on STATISTICS and check the box next to RISK. Hit CONTINUE
 Click on OK and the results will open in the OUTPUT window, or
o Click on PASTE, then highlight and run the syntax you just pasted into the
SYNTAX WINDOW, and the results will open up in the OUTPUT window