Combining environmental information. II: Environmental epidemiology and toxicology

An increasingly important concern in epidemiological and toxicological studies of environmental exposures is the need to combine information from diverse sources that relate to a common endpoint. This is clearly a statistical activity, but statistical techniques for data combination are still only developmental. Herein, we illustrate some current applications of combining information in environmental epidemiology and toxicology, with emphasis on the burgeoning use of meta-analyses for environmental settings. Our goal is to inform readers about modern statistical techniques useful for combining environmental information, with emphasis on more recently developed approaches.