Abstract Mediation analysis is popular in examining the extent to which the effect of an exposure on an outcome is through an intermediate variable. When the exposure is subject to misclassification, the effects estimated can be severely biased. In this paper, when the mediator is binary, we...

Abstract Standard causal mediation analysis decomposes the total effect into a direct effect and an indirect effect in settings with only one single mediator. Under the settings with multiple mediators, all mediators are often treated as one single block of mediators. The effect mediated by a...

This article provides an overview of recent developments in mediation analysis, that is, analyses used to assess the relative magnitude of different pathways and mechanisms by which an exposure may affect an outcome. Traditional approaches to mediation in the biomedical and social sciences are...

The purpose of this paper was to investigate psychometric properties of the newly proposed Flourish Index (FI) and Secure Flourish Index (SFI). Data were obtained from the Health and Well-Being Survey – conducted in June and July 2017, with responses from 4210 residents of North Carolina, USA....

Background: Vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy has been associated with increased risk of complications and adverse perinatal outcomes. We evaluated seasonal variation of 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] among pregnant women, focusing on patterns and determinants of variation. Methods: Data came...

Mendelian randomization methods, which use genetic variants as instrumental variables for exposures of interest to overcome problems of confounding and reverse causality, are becoming widespread for assessing causal relationships in epidemiological studies. The main purpose of this paper is to...

Abstract Mediation analysis is widely adopted to infer causal mechanism by disentangling indirect or mediated effects of an exposure on an outcome through given intermediaries, from the remaining direct effect. Traditional approaches build on standard regression models for the outcome and...