A matched caseCcontrol study (95 cases and 220 controls) was designed to study risk factors for atypical scrapie in sheep in France. and metabolic factors. gene, which codes for prion protein (PrP), modify the risk for this disease (gene confer susceptibility to sheep, a purely genetic origin is unlikely but a confounding effect could occur. Other possible origins for atypical scrapie could involve exposure to toxic substances, particularly pesticides, which were shown to be involved with other neurodegenerative diseases involving protein disorders such as Parkinson disease and Alzheimer disease (genotypes at codons 136, 141, 154, and 171 were determined by Labogena (Jouy en Josas; France). For cases, material examined consisted of a sample of soft tissue (muscle or ear) or brainstem. For controls, the matching constraint was relaxed to enable interviewers to sample some hair from any ewe born during C0CC0+2. Data Management Data were entered into a Microsoft (Redmond, WA, USA) Access 2000 database. All statistical analyses were performed by using R 2.6.1 for Windows (22). Three types of toxic exposure were assessed: pesticides on crops, insecticides on premises, and antiparasitic treatments. For each category, active components of products reported were identified from databases (23C26). The Direction des Vgtaux et de lEnvironnement from the Agence Fran?aise de Scurit Sanitaire des Aliments specified the known or suspected neurotoxic components and their mechanism of action. Three categorical variables were created and were assigned a value of 1 1 for a case of exposure to any neurotoxic product of the category of concern during C0CC2006 and a value of 0 otherwise. Missing values from the questionnaire were imputed by using available covariates as predictors after verifying Rabbit Polyclonal to FCGR2A that the missingness pattern was compatible with random missing (27). Genotypes were linearly classified into 5 levels of risk on a log scale (Table 1) according to the odds ratio (OR) estimated for the sheep population in France (19). Many genotypes were missing, mainly for controls because of difficulties in extracting DNA from hair samples (n = 117) and for a few cases because of unsuitable samples (n = 13). Missing values for controls were randomly imputed by using distribution of genotypes per breed. From the distribution of all available genotypes of cases of atypical scrapie in France, 20 datasets were imputed. To account for geographic distribution of flocks, France was divided into 9 sheep production areas according to sheep farming density and production patterns. Table 1 Genotypes grouped by levels of 1393477-72-9 manufacture genetic risk for atypical scrapie in sheep, France* Univariate and Multivariate Analyses Analyses were conditional to the matching variable and based on univariate and multivariate generalized linear mixed models with the logit link function for the outcome and C0 as a random coefficient (28,29). ORs and their 95% confidence intervals were derived from the coefficient estimates and variance parameters. When variables could not be introduced simultaneously in the multivariate analysis because they were collinear, the 1393477-72-9 manufacture most biologically sound variable was selected. Variables for the multivariate model were selected according to the recommendations of Hosmer and Lemeshow (28). Candidate variables for the multivariate model were backward selected according to the log-likelihood ratio test. Candidate variables with a p value <20% in univariate analyses were tested before other variables were tested. The effect of variables with a p value >20% on the coefficient parameter of the selected variables was then verified 1 at a time. Best parameterization of continuous variables and statistical 1393477-72-9 manufacture significance of interactions terms were then checked. A false discovery rate (FDR) (30) was calculated by using p values of the log-likelihood ratio tests for tested variables and interaction terms. A complementary model was used to assess if genetics influenced stability of the final model. For each of the datasets imputed, level of genetic risk was introduced in the final model as an ordinal covariate; coefficients, standard errors, and Wald test p values of different variables were inferred according to the method of Little and Rubin (27). Sensitivity Analysis The national database used to sample controls did not enable us.