Nicola Orsini and the Biostatistics team receives grant from EFSA for project on dose-response analysis in health risk assessment

The project aims to share competencies and procedures among epidemiologists, nutritionists, toxicologists, and biostatisticians, in order to develop and apply novel methods for performing dose-response analysis in the field of health risk assessment of nutritional and toxicological factors in food.

“The questions are: is there any relationship at all? How the response is changing throughout the exposure range? Is there any substantial change in the outcome beyond a certain exposure level?”, explains Nicola Orsini, Associate Professor at the Department of Public Health Sciences.

The developed procedures will be evaluated for their reliability and easiness of use through their application in two case-studies: (a) assessing the role of potassium in modifying blood pressure levels in the general European population including children, and (b) the effect of dietary cadmium on breast cancer risk. The two case-studies have been selected to allow testing the newly developed methods in health outcomes expressed either continuously or dichotomous.

The Consortium will include four national groups (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Karolinska Institutet, University of Athens, University of Porto) located in different EU Member States (Italy, Sweden, Greece, Portugal), will work under the perspective of ‘knowledge sharing’ given the common epidemiologic expertise of all partners and their joint interest in both nutritional epidemiology issues and meta-analyses, and will apply new dose-response meta-analytic biostatistical tools to specific case studies with specific reference to the European general population.