Analysis of the effect of occupational exposure to asbestos based on threshold regression modeling of case-control data

International audience; We analyze the effect of occupational exposure to asbestos on the occurrence of lung cancer based on arecent French case–control (CC) study. We build a large collection of threshold regression models, dataadaptivelyselect a better model by CC-weighted likelihood-based cross-validation and then fit this bettermodel by CC-weighted maximum likelihood. The CC-weighting allows us to draw valid inferences fromCC data without relying on a logistic regression. This is possible because the joint distribution of theindicator of being a case and matching variable is available beforehand owing to two studies independentfrom our data set. The implications of the fitted model in terms of years of life free of lung cancer lost dueto the exposure to asbestos are discussed.