Causation

Question 1

What type of prevention is most effective?

Answer 1

Primary prevention

Question 2

What is the difference between secondary and tertiary prevention?

Answer 2

Secondary prevention Aims to detect disease early before there are systems to improve patient outcomes
Tertiary prevention is aimed at people who already have established symptomatic disease and aims to prevent complications

Question 3

What is the importance of understanding causal factors?

Answer 3

Indentifies factors which meed to be tackled in order to reduce or eliminate the condition
Need to be understood for therapeutic activities so that the contribution of a specific therapy to a patients outcome can be assessed
It is also important in providing a sense of closure to patients

Question 4

What methods can be used to assess the role of chance in the results of a study?

Answer 4

Confidence intervals and P values

Question 5

What values of confidence interval and P value are required for results to be statistically significant?

Answer 5

95% confidence interval or more

5% P value or less

Question 6

What is bias?

Answer 6

Systematic error in The design, conduct or analysis of a study which results in mistaken estimates of any given factor of the risk or disease

Question 7

What is selection bias?

Answer 7

Error in the differential allocation of groups

Question 8

What factors are often confounding factors?

Answer 8

Age

Sex

Question 9

The Bradford hill guidelines indicate factors to consider when trying to decide if a factor is causal. These are…?

Answer 9

Strength of association
Consistency
Specificity
Temporality (cause before effect)
Biological gradient
Plausibility
Coherence
Experiment 
Analogy