INTRODUCTION Clinical epidemiology and biostatistics are the basic sciences of clinical research. This series of articles will provide a basic primer of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics for the orthopaedic surgeon. The evidence-based medicine and patient-derived outcomes assessment movements burst onto the scene of clinical medicine in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of contemporaneous m...

BACKGROUND Most epidemiological studies have missing information, leading to reduced power and potential bias. Estimates of exposure-outcome associations will generally be biased if the outcome variable is missing not at random (MNAR). Linkage to administrative data containing a proxy for the missing study outcome allows assessment of whether this outcome is MNAR and the evaluation of bias. We ...

cause of all hospital-acquired bloodstream infections.1–3 The negative health consequences associated with candidemia are very high.4–7 Previous studies report mortality rates attributable to candidemia ranging from 19% to 49% in adults.4,6,8,9 In addition, length of stay (LOS) in the hospital increases significantly among patients with candidemia. One study estimated a mean LOS increase of 21....

OBJECTIVE The best method to estimate glomerular filtration rate (GFR) in diabetic patients is still largely debated. We compared the performance of creatinine-based formulas in a European diabetic population. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We compared the performance of Cockcroft and Gault, simplified Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD), and Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology (CKD-EPI...

Econometricians Daniel McFadden and James Heckman won the 2000 Nobel Prize in economics for their work on discrete choice models and selection bias. Statisticians and epidemiologists have made similar contributions to medicine with their work on case-control studies, analysis of incomplete data, and causal inference. In spite of repeated nominations of such eminent figures as Bradford Hill and ...

This article presents a general review of the major trends in the conceptualization, development, and success of case-control methods for the study of disease causation and prevention. "Recent work on nested case-control, case-cohort, and two-stage case control designs demonstrates the continuing impact of statistical thinking on epidemiology. The influence of R. A. Fisher's work on these devel...

An important methodological challenge in the analysis of historical occupational cohort data is choosing the most appropriate metric for the average exposure of the workers under study. We describe and illustrate the many issues associated with this challenge using a recent re-analysis by Kopylev [1] of lung cancer mortality in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) acrylonitrile cohort study. Kop...

Reviewed in this article are selected recent advances and future challenges for psychiatric epidemiology. Major advances in descriptive psychiatric epidemiology in recent years include the development of reliable and valid fully structured diagnostic interviews, the implementation of parallel cross-national surveys of the prevalences and correlates of mental disorders, and the initiation of res...

OBJECTIVES To consider methods and related evidence for evaluating bias in non-randomised intervention studies. DATA SOURCES Systematic reviews and methodological papers were identified from a search of electronic databases; handsearches of key medical journals and contact with experts working in the field. New empirical studies were conducted using data from two large randomised clinical tri...