DOI: 10.2337/dc06-1568 © 2007 by the American Diabetes Association
Spatiotemporal Trends and Age-Period-Cohort Modeling of the Incidence of Type 1 Diabetes Among Children Aged <15 Years in Norway 19731982 and 19892003
1 EpiGen, Akershus University Hospital, Lørenskog, Norway Address correspondence and reprint requests to Geir Aamodt, Division of Epidemiology, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, P.O. Box 4404 Nydalen, N-0403 Oslo, Norway. E-mail: geir.aamodt{at}fhi.no
OBJECTIVEWe have investigated age-period-cohort effects and spatial and temporal trends for the incidence of type 1 diabetes among 0- to 14-year-old children in Norway. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODSWe included children with the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes in Norway during 19731982 and 19892003. We studied age, calendar period, and birth cohort effects using Poisson regression, including Holford's method of parameterization, to model the dependencies between age, period, and cohort effects. To study spatiotemporal clustering of cases, we used spatial scan statistics. RESULTSThe overall incidence rate for the study population <15 years of age was 22.7 cases per 100,000 (95% CI 22.123.4), showing an average annual increase of 1.2% (95% CI 0.71.5%) during the study period. One specific area with 30% increased incidence rates was identified in the southern part of Norway during 19761980 (P = 0.001). Also, children born during 19641966 in a specific region in the southern part of Norway as well as children born during 19871989 in a region in northern Norway showed 2.0 and 2.6 times, respectively, higher incidence rates compared with the rest of the country (both P = 0.001). CONCLUSIONSThe incidence of type 1 diabetes among children increased during the study period. Birth cohort effects were identified using the spatiotemporal scan statistic but not using age, period, and birth cohort modeling. Such effects, within the relatively homogenous Norwegian population, suggest the influence of nongenetic etiological factors.
Abbreviations: APC, age-period-cohort
The incidence of type 1 diabetes among children is increasing worldwide (1,2). The incidence rate varies among countries and is highest in the Nordic countries (1). The etiology of the disease is not known. The presence of genetic components is evident, but nongenetic factors are also thought to be involved in the etiology. Different environmental factors are suggested, such as infections, nutritional factors, and toxins (3). Several of these show different spatial and temporal variability. Specific infections are often limited in space and time, and dietary factors reflect cultural differences and show both geographic and temporal variability. If associations among such exposure variables and the disease exist, it is likely that the distribution of the disease also depends on geographic location, time of birth (birth cohort), or calendar period. If the incidence rate increases steadily over time (linearly), the increase may be attributable to a steadily increasing exposure to one or more risk factors or steadily decreased exposure to protective factors, as opposed to nonlinear or epidemic-like patterns in incidence rates, which may point to potential etiological factors changing abruptly over time. For instance, nonlinear birth cohort effects could be consistent with epidemics of specific congenital infections. It is therefore of importance to depict the geographic and temporal distribution of the disease as precisely as possible to enable identification of potential etiological factors. The linear dependence among age, period, and cohort makes it necessary to apply specific modeling strategies for this task (4,5). Calendar period, birth cohort, and age effects are described in different studies of type 1 diabetes (611), but few studies have been devoted to age-period-birth cohort modeling. Spatial variability has also been studied with different methodological approaches (8,1214), but few studies have used a combined spatiotemporal approach to type 1 diabetes. Temporal trends and regional variation in incidence of childhood-onset type 1 diabetes among counties in Norway have been published previously for the periods 19731982 (15) and 19891998 (16). In addition to presenting new data for the period 19992003, we aimed to study both temporal and spatial trends in the incidence for the combined nationwide data collected for 19731982 and 19892003, including age, period, and cohort modeling.
All children <15 years of age with the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes are included in the Norwegian Childhood Diabetes Registry. Children were included retrospectively during 19731982 and prospectively from 1989 to the present date, both with a high level of ascertainment (15,16). In this study, we included cases until December 31, 2003. Norway is situated in the northwestern part of Europe and consists of 19 counties and 434 municipalities. The Norwegian population was 4,557,457 inhabitants in 2004: 467,046 were boys and 443,490 were girls <15 years of age. The size of the population aged <15 years varies considerably in the municipalities. The median, 25th, and 75th percentiles were 4,455, 2,210, and 9,470 inhabitants, respectively. Data on population size for each sex and the 3-year age-groups in each single calendar year were taken from Statistics Norway (http://www.ssb.no).
Age-period-cohort analysis
abc is the incidence rate, Aa is the age effect for age-group a, D is the drift component described above, Pp is the calendar period effect for calendar period p, and Cc is the birth cohort effect for birth cohort c. In this application, the drift component was chosen to be dependent on calendar period p, as a continuous variable, and for the nonlinear part, the calendar period is included as a categorical variable. The calendar period and birth cohort effects are therefore independent of the linear drift component. We used a likelihood ratio test to compare different models. The observations were categorized into 3-year intervals: The groups for age at onset were 02, 35, 68, 911, and 1214 years of age. The calendar periods were 1973, 19741976, and 20012003. This resulted in 15 birth cohorts from 1958 to 2003 with corresponding middle years 1959 and 2001.
Spatial and spatiotemporal trend analysis Separate analyses were performed for 1) pure spatial clusters, 2) spatiotemporal clusters for calendar periods, and 3) spatiotemporal clusters for birth cohorts. For the pure spatial analysis and spatiotemporal analysis for diagnostic periods, models were fitted for the two periods of registration (19731982 and 19892003). The spatial scan method has been shown to have satisfactory power in detecting clusters but difficulties in identifying the shape of the clusters for low magnitudes of incidence rate ratios (18,19).
Estimated incidence rates (with corresponding 95% CIs) for sex, age-groups, calendar periods, and county are shown in Table 1. The mean incidence rate for children aged 014 years was 22.7 (22.123.4) cases per 100,000 and was increasing during the study period.
APC study Table 2 shows the results from the APC models, in which sex is also included. The model that best fit the data included sex, age, the drift component, and calendar period (model 6, Table 2). The drift component is common to both the calendar period and birth cohort. The calendar period included in the model is a nonlinear effect deviating from the linear drift component and showed that there were higher incidence rates during the last part of the study period. The birth cohort component was not statistically significant once age, period, the drift component, and cohort were included in the model (P = 0.471, compare models 6 and 9 in Table 2). The incidence rate was 1.12 (95% CI 1.061.17) times higher for boys than for girls. The age component showed a peak for children in the age-group between 9 and 11 years (see also Table 1). The drift component showed an annual increase of 1.2% (95% CI 0.71.5%). To study whether the age at onset changed during the study period, we included an interaction term between age and the drift component in the model (see Table 2, models 6 and 10). The interaction term was not significant (P = 0.527), showing that such a change was not present in our data.
Calendar period and geographic location Incident cases during the period 19731982. The result from the spatial scan method for pure spatial clusters showed one cluster during 19731982, located in the southern part of Norway (P = 0.001). The incidence rate was 23.7 per 100,000 in the cluster, which is 1.2 times higher than expected. The result from the spatiotemporal analysis showed one cluster for this period of time. The cluster was located in the central part of southern Norway during the years 19761980 (Fig. 1A). The incidence rate was 25.0 per 100,000 in the cluster, which was 1.3 times higher than expected (P = 0.001).
Incident cases during the period 19892003. The result from the pure spatial analysis showed two spatial clusters. The first cluster was situated in the southern part of south Norway and showed an incidence rate equal to 33.6 per 100,000, which is 1.5 times higher than expected (P = 0.001). The second cluster was situated in the middle part of southern Norway and showed an incidence rate equal to 25.9 per 100,000. This was only 1.1 times higher than expected (P = 0.017). During this registration period, one spatiotemporal cluster close to statistical significance and located in the southern part of Norway during the last 4 years (20002003) was identified (Fig. 1B). The incidence rate was 1.3 times higher than expected (P = 0.076).
Birth cohorts and geographic location
Our studies show that despite a stable incidence period from 1989 to 1998 (16), the incidence of type 1 diabetes increased in a nonlinear way during the study period. We found no overall cohort effect for Norway, but there were indications that children born during specific intervals and living in specific regions experienced relatively high incidence rates. Children living in a region in southern Norway were also more likely to get the disease during some time intervals. The regions identified as hot-spot clusters were relatively large, with modest increases in incidence, although the increases were up to 2.6-fold in models including spatiotemporal windows.
Strengths and limitations
Comparisons with previous studies Regional variation has previously been described in Norway at the level of counties, with an increased incidence in the southern county called Vest-Agder, which includes 15 municipalities and a total of about 3.5% of the Norwegian population (16). Our study identified a cluster north of the previously identified county. Although different statistical methods have been used in different studies, several reports show significant spatial variability within countries. In accordance with our data, investigations from Finland (12) and Italy (8) have shown relatively large areas with increased incidence, whereas a Swedish study (13) identified smaller hot-spot regions the size of municipalities.
Possible explanations for the observations Consistent with earlier studies showing acidic waters in southern Norway, we have previously demonstrated an association between lower tap water pH and a higher risk of type 1 diabetes (24), which potentially could explain part of the clustering in southern Norway. Future studies could include municipality level information on acidity and other measures of quality of drinking water in ecologic analyses. It is difficult to imagine that genetic factors can explain the increasing incidence of type 1 diabetes over time; although the Norwegian and other Nordic populations are commonly believed to be relatively homogeneous, we cannot exclude the possibility that some of the spatial variation is due to genetic factors. Previous studies have shown that the high-risk HLA genotype could explain some of the variations between European countries (25) and even between three areas in Finland (26). We have, however, previously reported that the prevalence of the high-risk HLA genotype in the general population in Vest-Agder county (27) is very similar to that identified in Norway as a whole (28). This is an important argument against the hypothesis that the most important genetic factors in type 1 diabetes contribute to the regional variation in incidence in Norway. More research on spatial variability of genetic markers within countries like Norway is needed to better understand the link between genetic predisposition and spatial variability of disease. Future studies could also benefit from inclusion of information on different ethnic groups. Although data are not entirely consistent with a role of enterovirus in the etiology of type 1 diabetes, it might be speculated that aspects of enterovirus infections could be explained in part by the spatiotemporal patterns in type 1 diabetes incidence. Studies of spatiotemporal distribution of enterovirus in Norway are ongoing, but the correct identification of relevant enterovirus species and serotypes is difficult and laborious. Results obtained up to now demonstrate epidemic-like patterns specific for enterovirus species and perhaps serotypes (29). Future analysis of enterovirus in larger samples from the MIDIA study (29), a study of environmental causes of type 1 diabetes, may aid in the endeavor to explain our observed spatiotemporal patterns in type 1 diabetes incidence. To conclude, the incidence of type 1 diabetes among children increased during the study period 19732003, and there were birth cohort effects only when regions were taken into account. Using methods simultaneously accommodating age, period, cohort, and geographic location, we found regional differences for both calendar period and birth cohorts. Such effects indicate complex interactions including environmental factors, lifestyle, and perhaps genetics in the etiology of type 1 diabetes.
Members of the Norwegian Childhood Diabetes Study Group are the following: Henning Aabech and Sven Simonsen, Fredrikstad; Helge Vogt, Lørenskog; Kolbeinn Gudmundsson, Anne Grethe Myhre, Knut Dahl-Jørgensen, and Geir Joner, Oslo; Jon Grøtta, Elverum; Ola Tallerås and Dag Helge Frøisland, Lillehammer; Halvor Bævre, Gjøvik; Kjell Stensvold, Drammen; Bjørn Halvorsen, Tønsberg; Kristin Hodnekvam, Skien; Ole Kr. Danielsen, Arendal; Jorunn Ulriksen and Unni Mette Köpp, Kristiansand; Jon Bland, Stavanger; Dag Roness, Haugesund; Oddmund Søvik and Pål R. Njølstad, Bergen; Per Helge Kvistad, Førde; Steinar Spangen, Ålesund; Per Erik Hæreid, Trondheim; Sigurd Børsting, Levanger; Dag Veimo, Bodø; Harald Dramsdahl, Harstad; Bård Forsdahl, Tromsø; and Kersti Elisabeth Thodenius and Ane Kokkvoll, Hammerfest.
We thank Bjørn Møller, PhD, at the Norwegian Cancer Registry for providing us source code and assistance for APC modeling.
* A complete list of the members of The Norwegian Childhood Diabetes Study Group can be found in the APPENDIX. A table elsewhere in this issue shows conventional and Système International (SI) units and conversion factors for many substances. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact. Received for publication July 26, 2006. Accepted for publication December 20, 2006.
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||