Multilevel Modeling in Epidemiology with GLIMMIX

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Abstract
Previous work has shown that multilevel modeling can be a valuable technique for epidemiologic analysis. The complexity of using this approach, however, continues to restrict its general application. A critical factor is the lack of flexible and appropriate software for multilevel modeling. SAS provides a macro, GLIMMIX, that can be used for multilevel modeling, but that is not sufficient for a complete epidemiologic analysis. We here provide additional code to obtain epidemiologic output from GLIMMIX, illustrated with new data on diet and breast cancer from the European Community Multicenter Study on Antioxidants, Myocardial Infarction, and Breast Cancer (EURAMIC). Our results give epidemiologists an easily used tool for fitting multilevel models.