Kent R. Bailey, Ph.D.

Kent R. Bailey, Ph.D., is a senior statistician who has been primarily involved in cardiovascular and hypertension studies over the last 26 years.

His statistical work and interests have included applying survival methods in novel contexts, such as hypertension control, and developing models for the local prevalence and trends in obesity as well as age-recursive models for disease prevalence.

More recently, Dr. Bailey has been involved in statistical genetics, specifically the analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS), including dimension reduction, principal components, gene set enrichment analysis, index construction, and replication and validation.

Focus areas

• Using incidence and relative survival data to derive age- and sex-specific prevalence rates for any disease
• Modeling obesity in the community and developing the ability to estimate its impact on the various diseases for which Olmsted County, Minnesota, incidence series are available, including estimation of attributable risk
• Expanding the use of survival analysis tools, including the use of standard survival methodology in cross-sectional settings, such as hypertension control data and stress testing data
• Expanding survival methods themselves to censored parametric modeling following empirical transformations to normality
• Analysis of GWAS data in pharmacogenomic hypertension studies, with attention to the problem of high-dimension and dimension reduction techniques

Significance to patient care

Dr. Bailey's research will help to delineate the role of behaviors (such as obesity and smoking) and genetics in the etiology of important diseases: cardiovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease and cerebrovascular disease.