Assocation, Casual Inference And Casuality

Question 1

What is a cause?

Answer 1

A precursor event , condition, or characteristic required for occurrence of disease or outcome

Stat. Studies help identify these Associations b/w exposure and disease

Question 2

What are the three types of associations or relationships?

Answer 2

Artifactual asoc.
Non causal assoc.
Casual assoc.

Question 3

True or false:

Associations are relationships b/w exposure and treatment and outcome and disease

Answer 3

True

Question 4

What is Artifactual Causation ?

Answer 4

It a false association resulting from confounding, effect mod, or bias

Question 5

What are the ways of describing non-causal associations?

Answer 5

Disease may cause the exposure ( related to the OR/RR/HR)
Ex:Rheumatoid arthritis causes reduced activity

The disease and exposure are both associated with a 3rd variable (confounding)
Ex: coffee , CHD

Question 6

What is causal assocations?

Answer 6

Sufficient cause
A require or condition (THE CAUSE) that produces the disease
Rare ex: genetic abnormalities

Necessary Cause
A cause proceeds a disease
The cause must be present for the disease to occur BUTTTTT cause can exists without the disease presence

Component cause “risks”
It increases the chance or probability of having the disease
Sometimes people have to be weak, primed , or susceptible to disease before the cause causes the disease
Ex: Age, smoking and lungs. You can smoke for 30 years and still not get cancer

Question 7

What two factors or interactions that affect causal research?

Answer 7

Parallelism
Even though 2 factors can effect presence or occurrence of a disease both of them do not have to be there. It only takes 1 to increase the risk of that occurring or measure of effect

Synergism
Risk factors work together and modified their effect on the variable and the new effect IS GREATER than the sum of individual effects

Question 8

What do we use to measure the causal inference?

Answer 8

Hills criteria or guidelines

Question 9

What are the names of different criteria within Hills criteria ?

Answer 9

Strength
Consistency
Temporality
Biologic gradient
Plausibility

Question 10

What is strength (Hills criteria)

Answer 10

The larger the association the more impactful that relationship is
Ex: smokers have a 20X greater risk to developing lung cancer compared to to non smoker

Question 11

What is Consistency (hills criteria) ?

Answer 11

Reproducibility
How repeated or consistent are the results or observer studies
Ex: menopausal hormone therapy

Question 12

What was menopausal hormone therapy and what did it show?

Answer 12

1. ) Multiple observation studies showed that estrogen after menopause was beneficial(Woman’s health initiative (WHI))
2. ) studies were consist until a differently preformed studied showed that the relation swaps the opposite (double blind placebo)

It IS AN EXAMPLE OF CONSISTENCY

Question 13

What is temporality?

Answer 13

Temporality reflects that cause precedes the effect/outcome in time

Proximate cause - short time interval
Distant cause - long term interval

Question 14

What is biological gradient?

Answer 14

The gradient of risk (dose-response) associated with degree of exposure.

Wether it is beneficial or non beneficial

Ex: lead exposure and mental retardation

Question 15

What is plausibility?

Answer 15

Basically does can you explain the HSE through physiologically and biologically.

It can change as we gain the ability to learn things we didn’t previously know about