| Abstract: | Quantitative risk assessments in public health settings intend to describe the hazard of a specific exposure in a given population on the basis of epidemiological and/or experimental results. Two different risk quantities, the absolute lifetime excess risk and the loss-of-lifetime, which differ in their definition of hazard, are discussed and compared. For both measures estimation procedures are derived and the relationship between the various estimates which are currently in use are investigated. It is shown that the two most common estimators can be written as special cases of a more general concept. This leads to conclusions about the assumptions on which different estimation procedures are implicitly based. For all discussed estimators variance estimates are derived. The analytical results for both risk parameters will be elucidated by an example on lung cancer risk due to residential radon in Germany. |
