title: Surnames as markers of pathologies--two statistical techniques and their applications.
abstract: The objective of this research is to propose and to validate two different statistical techniques to test the hypothesis of an association between surnames and pathologies, in a population participating in a screening procedure for a given pathology. We propose two statistical methods: a first technique is based on the rarefaction method, and second one is based on the principle of resampling, and it can be considered a special case of a randomisation test. Both the techniques are applied to a data set of babies screened for congenital hypothyroidism (CH), and they gave similar results. The large overlapping of the results seems to suggest a substantial validity of the proposed techniques.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Biomathematics, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy. m.rocchi@uniurb.it
authors.forename: Marco B L
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Rocchi
mesh_terms: D003409:Congenital Hypothyroidism / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000235:genetics; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D050174:Genetic Diseases, Y-Linked / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000235:genetics; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007558:Italy / Q000453:epidemiology; D009275:Names; D015997:Neonatal Screening