On the Existence of Suitable Models for Additive Interaction with Continuous Exposures

Abstract

Additive interaction can be of importance for public health interventions and it is commonly defined using binary exposures. There has been expansions of the models to also include continuous exposures, which could lead to better and more precise estimations of the effect of interventions. In this paper we define the intervention for a continuous exposure as a monotonic function. Based on this function for the interventions we prove that there is no model for estimating additive interactions with continuous exposures for which it holds that; (i) both exposures have marginal effects and no additive interaction on the exposure level for both exposures, (ii) neither exposure has marginal effect and there is additive interaction between the exposures. We also show that a logistic regression model for continuous exposures will always produce additive interaction if both exposures have marginal effects.QC 20190925</p