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Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects about a tenth of the population aged over 65 and nearly half of those over 85, and the number of AD patients continues to grow. Several studies have shown that the ϵ 4 variant of the apolipoprotein E ( A P O E ) gene is potentially associated with an increased risk of AD. In this study, we aimed to investigate the causal effect of A P O E - ϵ 4 on Alzheimer's disease under the potential outcome framework and evaluate the individualized risk of disease onset for A P O E - ϵ 4 carriers. A total of 1705 Hispanic individuals from the Washington Heights-Inwood Columbia Aging Project (WHICAP) were included in this study, comprising 453 A P O E - ϵ 4 carriers and 1252 non-carriers. Among them, 265 subjects had developed AD (23.2%). The non-parametric Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) approach was applied to model the individualized causal effects of A P O E - ϵ 4 on disease onset in the presence of right-censored outcomes. The heterogeneous risk of A P O E - ϵ 4 on AD was examined through the individualized posterior survival probability and posterior causal effects. The results showed that, on average, patients carrying A P O E - ϵ 4 were 0.968 years younger at onset than those with non-carrying status, and the disease risk associated with A P O E - ϵ 4 carrying status was 3.9 % higher than that for non-carrying status; however, it should be noted that neither result was statistically significant. The posterior causal effects of A P O E - ϵ 4 for individualized subjects indicate that 14.41% of carriers presented strong evidence of AD risk and approximately 38.65% presented mild evidence, while around 13.71% of non-carriers presented strong evidence of AD risk and 40.89% presented mild evidence. Furthermore, 79.26% of carriers exhibited a posterior probability of disease risk greater than 0.5. In conclusion, no significant causal effect of the A P O E - ϵ 4 gene on AD was observed at the population level, but strong evidence of AD risk was identified in a sub-group of A P O E - ϵ 4 carriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background--China's key state-owned forest areas have played an important role in building regional ecological security barriers, maintaining food security, and stabilizing the social system of border forest areas. Women are the main participants in forest industry development, ecological environmental protection, forest resource management, family organization maintenance, etc. Their economic decisions and behavior choices at home or at work will directly affect the social opening, ecological economic development and regional integration level of the key state-owned forest areas. The current research is more inclined to understand the differences of female economic behaviors between urban and rural areas and the characteristic economic behaviors of ethnic areas, and there are few studies on the economic behaviors of female groups in special regions that rely on natural resources. (2) Methods--Based on the field visits to the key state-owned forest areas, the research data and information were collected through structured questionnaires, semi-structured in-depth interviews and symposiums to form a complete triangular data chain to ensure that the data could be mutually complementary and cross-verified. This paper used case study method to study the economic behaviors of female groups who were affected by the adjustment of forestry policies, the promotion of forestry projects and the reforms of the state-owned forest areas and still lived in the forest farms or places of forestry bureaus of the key state-owned forest areas. (3) Results--First, the trend of feminization and part-time employment of the labor force in the key state-owned forest areas is significant, and women participating in front-line forestry work and family production and management account for more than 60% of the total number of women in the forest areas. Second, the non-agricultural employment of women in the key state-owned forest areas shows a diversified trend, which is mainly manifested in two types: local employment and non-agricultural operation. But they generally work in the family residences or the surrounding areas, the labor flexibility is strong, and thus they can achieve part-time employment. Third, some women in the key state-owned forest areas have become family members from market elements. Due to the intensifying contradiction between the declining educational resources in the forest areas and the rising educational expectations of parents, some unemployed or flexible employed women have become accompanying mothers, including full-time accompanying mothers and part-time accompanying mothers. They must wait for their children to complete their education before choosing whether to re-enter the labor market. (4) Conclusions and Discussions--First, under the comprehensive effect of industry policies, working habits and economic interests, the key state-owned forest areas show strong characteristics of labor feminization, and the degree of female part-time employment is high. Second, there are various forms of non-agricultural employment for women in the key state-owned forest areas. With the improvement of labor allocation efficiency, the overall employment situation in the forest areas is optimized, and a good situation of organic and coordinated development of individuals, families and society is formed. Third, due to the educational reform of the key stateowned forest areas, the contradiction between educational resources and educational expectations is deepening. In order to solve this contradiction, some women become accompanying mothers, and they choose to temporarily leave the labor market and submit to the distribution of family resources. Based on the above analysis, the following policy recommendations are put forward: First, ensure women's rights and interests, especially against gender discrimination, and ensure that women can participate in labor and job competition fairly. At the same time, more ecological public welfare jobs should be created. Second, encourage women to maintain the labor tradition. Third, encourage female groups to break the old family division of labor mode and achieve balance in the integration of social and family resources through the regular training in vocational skills and legal knowledge and so on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies with survival endpoints, it is often of interest to predict the disease risk or survival probabilities in the presence of censored failure times. One commonly used approach is to model the association between the survival outcome and covariates via a semiparametric regression model and use the fitted model for prediction. In this article, we propose two methods to evaluate or predict the survival rates. The first method estimates survival probabilities by matching survival functions, and the second one is based on matching censored quantiles. Unlike traditional regression approaches, the proposed methods directly match the distribution of linear combinations of the covariates to the entire target distribution or parts of it. To accommodate censoring, we adopt a redistribution‐of‐mass technique for the proposed matching censored quantiles. The asymptotic consistency of the resulting estimators is well established. Simulation studies and an example with real data are also provided to further illustrate the practical utilities of our proposals. The proposed methods have been implemented in an R package. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]