Hi John,

the lowess plot can be misleading sometimes (as it is just the smoothed scatter 
data per group and not controlled for anything). It is not a regression 
analysis. Also note that the columns in your M matrix are not the same as in 
the table (because you usually drop the first 2 columns and then convert to 
numbers). 

For setting up your design, you should talk to a biostatistician. I don’ know 
what variables are time-varying, or what the clinical scales is, do all 
subjects have a disease duration or only one group etc.
 
A design to test for different slopes per group (assuming group is 0 and 1) 
would be:
1-column time group timeXgroup (more columns with covars such as age sex etc)
the 4th column can be used for testing a group-slope interaction (if yearly 
thickness rates differ across groups). 

If you assume slope does not differ across groups, but rather depends on 
disease duration, you can replace group with disease duration (and you can add 
a group column also for allowing an offset per group, or you can include the 
groupXtime interaction and even add a groupXtimeXdiseasedurtation column). You 
see that it can get complicated if you like. The next question will be what of 
these should be random effects. I would recommend to only have the intercept 
(1-column) as random, and maybe the time column, but even that may not be 
necessary. There is a description on the wiki how to compare models to 
determine if including the time random effect makes sense or not.

Best, Martin


> On Jan 13, 2016, at 3:07 PM, John Anderson <j.ander...@publicist.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Dr Martin,
> I have longitudinal database for subjects scanned multiple times. I want to 
> study the changes in cortical thickness over time. I prepared my longitudinal 
> table  ( column#1 fsid column#2 fsid-base column#3 group column#4 bilateral 
> motor cortex thickness column#5 time (years) column#6 disease duration)
> Then I followed the instructions like in wiki... and I plot the changes in 
> motor cortex over time using the command :
>  
> lme_lowessPlot(M:,5),Y(:,1)m0.7,M(:,3))
>  
> My questions are:
> 1. How can I regress the effect of disease duration  (column#6) ? is it by 
> running the previous command line by replaceing M(:,5) ( time) by M(:,6) 
> disease duration?
> 2. If I am interested in studying the change in cortical thickness by the 
> change in clinical scale over time is it correct to replce the coloumn #5 ( 
> time) by a column for the clinical scales? 
>  
>  
> Thanks in advance for any advice!
>  
> Bests,
> John 
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