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© 1979 Oxford University Press

research-article

A Test of Significance for Geographic Clusters of Disease

YOSHIYUKI OHNO1, KUNIO AOKI1 and NOBUO AOKI2

1 Department of Preventive Medicine, Nagoya University School of Medicine, 65 Tsurumai-cho Showa-ku Nagoya Aichi, 466, Japan
2 Department of Public Health, Aichi Medical College, Iwasaku Nagakute-cho, Aichi-gun Aichi, 480–11, Japan

Ohno Y [Department of Preventive Medicine, Nagoya University School of Medicine, 65 Tsurumai-cho Showa-ku, Nagoya Aichi, 466, Japan] Aoki K and Aoki N. A test of significance for geographic clusters of disease. International Journal of Epidemiology 1979, 8: 273–280.

The geographic pattern of disease has been visually studied by depicting the categorized mortality or morbidity rates on a map. Visual study, however, by no means indicates the statistical significance of observed clusters, i.e., whether or not the geographic aggregations could occur by chance alone.

In this paper, an approach for assessing the deviation from chance expectation of the geographic pattern actually observed on the map is described. A simple chi-square test is proposed, and its validity is substantiated by a Monte Carlo approach, which is derived analytically as a special case of Knox's test for space–time clustering.

The parameters required for the test are (1) total number of areas, (2) numbers of subareas for each mortality or morbidity category, (3) total number of geographically adjacent areas, and (4) observed numbers of adjacent areas having concordant category pairs.

Revised 17 April 1979


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