Research Associate
Brigham and Women's Hospital

catherine.berkey@channing.harvard.edu

Dr. Berkey’s past and ongoing interests fall into three primary areas. These include development of statistical methods for longitudinal data, for dental research, and for meta-analysis. These developments have been applied to a wide range of biomedical applications, with current efforts concentrating on the study of obesity in older children and adolescents.

Her earliest research on longitudinal methods focused on the growth of children but later was extended to other areas. She developed methods for deriving growth standards that are more longitudinal in nature than are more familiar standards. These include height growth velocity standards for adolescents, and longitudinal preschool standards for height and weight (jointly). Statistical models (growth curve models) and methods, linear and nonlinear, that can appropriately assess the affects of covariates (such as dietary intakes) upon growth, were obtained. Dr. Berkey and colleagues applied their methods to study the effects of passive smoking on pulmonary function growth of children. Her new approach for incomplete longitudinal data was applied to adolescent and young adult blood pressures. Other applications of these longitudinal methods included young adult blood pressures and weight changes/obesity/birth size, distribution of body fat, occupational lead exposure, kidney dialysis therapy, lung function standards in children, and effects of passive smoking on height growth of children. More recent work along these lines includes study of the development of asthma in children, correlates of age at menarche in girls, preschool dietary precursors of obesity, adolescent dietary factors (breakfast, sugar-added beverages, dairy foods) and weight gain, adolescent activity and inactivity and weight change, and a simulation study of methods for estimating factors affecting adolescent BMI changes.

A statistical model for loss of sound tooth surfaces was applied to a longitudinal study of dental radiographs, and Dr. Berkey introduced the application of survival analysis to dentistry in an analysis of carious lesion progression. She also published on statistical methods for comparing dental diagnostic procedures, and worked with colleagues on analyses of dental radiograph reliability and clinical indicators of dental diseases.

Meta analysis is the third major area to which she contributed substantially over the years. She developed methods (and the software to apply them) for fixed effects multiple outcomes meta analysis, random-effects meta-regression models, then combining these two ideas to derive random effects multiple outcomes methods. Other work used simulations to demonstrate the hazards of the cumulative meta analysis approach. Meta-analysis applications that she collaborated on include alternative medicine therapies for hypertension, efficacy of BCG vaccine for tuberculosis, periodontal disease, arthritis, genetic risk of COPD, treatment of cancer pain, treatment for myocardial infarction and for bacterial meningitis.

Berkey CS. Bayesian approach for a nonlinear growth model. Biometrics. 1982 Dec;38(4):953-61. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Reed RB, Valadian I. Longitudinal growth standards for preschool children. Ann Hum Biol. 1983 Jan-Feb;10(1):57-67. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Ware JH, Speizer FE, Ferris BG, Jr. Passive smoking and height growth of preadolescent children. Int J Epidemiol. 1984 Dec;13(4):454-8. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Laird NM. Nonlinear growth curve analysis: Estimating the population parameters. Ann Hum Biol. 1986 Mar-Apr;13(2):111-28. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Ware JH, Dockery DW, Ferris BG, Jr, Speizer FE. Indoor air pollution and pulmonary function growth in preadolescent children. Am J Epidemiol. 1986 Feb;123(2):250-60. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Laird NM, Valadian I, Gardner J. The analysis of longitudinal growth data with covariates In: Tanner JM, editor. Auxology '88: Perspectives in the Science of Growth and Development. London: Smith Gordon, 1989. p. 3l-40. No abstract available.

Berkey CS, Douglass CW, Valachovic RW, Chauncey HH, McNeil BJ. Statistical methods for comparing dental diagnostic procedures. Community Dent Oral Epidemiol. 1990 Aug;18(4):169-76. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Laird NM, Gardner J, Valadian I. Longitudinal analysis of incomplete adolescent data. Ann Hum Biol. 1991 Jul-Aug;18(4):311-26. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Laird NM, Valadian I, Gardner J. Modeling adolescent blood pressure patterns and their prediction of adult pressures. Biometrics. 1991 Sep;47(3):1005-18. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Dockery DW, Wang X, Wypij D, Ferris BG, Jr. Longitudinal height velocity standards for US adolescents. Stat Med. 1993 Feb;12(3-4):403-14. [abstract]

Colditz GA, Brewer TF, Berkey CS, Wilson ME, Burdick E, Fineberg HV, Mosteller F. The efficacy of bacillus calmette-guerin vaccination in the prevention of tuberculosis: meta-analysis of the published literature. JAMA. 1994 Mar 2;271(9):698-702. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Hoaglin DC, Mosteller F, Colditz GA. A random-effects regression model for meta-analysis. Stat Med. 1995 Feb 28;14(4):395-411. [abstract]

Colditz GA, Berkey CS, Mosteller F, Brewer TF, Wilson ME, Burdick E, Fineberg HV. The efficacy of bacillus calmette-guerin vaccination of newborns and infants in the prevention of tuberculosis: meta-analyses of the published literature. Pediatrics. 1995 Jul;96(1 Pt 1):29-35. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Mosteller F, Lau J, Antman E. Uncertainty of the time of first significance in random-effects cumulative meta-analysis. Control Clin Trials. 1996 Oct;17(5):357-71. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Gardner J, Colditz GA. Blood pressure in adolescence and early adulthood related to obesity and birth size. Obes Res. 1998 May;6(3):187-95. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Hoaglin DC, Antczak-Bouckoms A, Mosteller F, Colditz GA. Meta-analysis of multiple outcomes by regression with random-effects. Stat Med. 1998 Nov 30;17(22):2537-50. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Frazier AL, Gardner JD, Colditz GA. Adolescence and breast carcinoma risk. Cancer. 1999 Jun 1;85(11):2400-9. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Gardner J, Frazier AL, Colditz GA. Relation of childhood diet and body size to menarche and adolescent growth in girls. Am J Epidemiol. 2000 Sep 1;152(5):446-52. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Rockett HRH, Gillman MW, Colditz GA. One year changes in activity and in inactivity among 10- to 15-year old boys and girls: Relationship to change in body mass index. Pediatrics. 2003 Apr;111(4 Pt 1):836-43. [abstract]

Gold DR, Damokosh AI, Dockery DW, Berkey CS. Body Mass Index as a predictor of incident asthma in a prospective cohort of children. Pediatr Pulmonol. 2003 Dec;36(6):514-21. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Rockett HR, Willett WC, Colditz GA. Milk, dairy fat, dietary calcium and weight gain: a longitudinal study of adolescents. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2005 Jun;159(6):543-50. [abstract]

Berkey CS, Colditz GA. Adiposity in adolescents: Change in actual BMI works better than change in BMI Z-score for longitudinal studies. Annals of Epidemiology 2006; (in press).