LAUSR

Joint analyses of two or more related diseases bring advantages over individual studies to look into diseases with low incidence, or to disentangle spatial patterns by age-group and gender. Incidence and/or mortality are not homogeneously distributed according to age-groups and ignoring age may lead to biased estimates. In addition, counts at a very disaggregated level can be very scarce or even zero for rare diseases and powerful models to borrow strength from related processes and geographical areas are strongly recommended. In this paper, gender and age-specific spatial shared component models are proposed for a joint modelling of brain cancer incidence and mortality rates in Navarre and the Basque Country, two regions in the north of Spain with the highest incidence rates among European regions.