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This book presents a logical system of critical appraisal, to allow readers to evaluate studies and to carry out their own studies more effectively. This system emphasizes the central importance of cause and effect relationships. Its great strength is that it is applicable to a wide range of issues, and both to intervention trials and observational studies. This system unifies the often different approaches used in epidemiology, health services research, clinical trials, and evidence-based medicine, starting from a logical consideration of cause and effect. The author's approach to the issues of study design, selection of subjects, bias, confounding, and the place of statistical methods has ...
Critical appraisal is central to the development of rational health care and evidence-based medicine, by applying it to questions of aetiology, clinical therapy, and health care management. The reader will learn how to assess the strengths and weaknesses of new studies, and how to conduct their own studies.
There is still no clear understanding of what causes the great majority of human congenital malformations. And since in most sorts of human disease and pathology that yet prevail prevention usually awaits understanding of cause, it is generally thought that the same is true of developmental aberrations. But is this true? For the relatively few congenital malformations whose causes are primarily environmental, it is plain that their discovery has enabled prevention, but not nec essarily immediately. It took a generation from the time of the discovery that maternal rubella was teratogenic to learn how to immunize against it. Much debate occurred before it was appreciated that thalidomide was a...
Over the past fifty years, the case-control method, and to a lesser extent its case-based variants, have become the most important tools for the investigator of health problems. The case control method is the study of persons with the disease and a suitable control group of persons who do not have the disease. The book helps readers address a number of general and specific questions dealing with the case-control and other case-based methods, including questions of how to design and implement a case-control study that minimizes biases, how to analyze the data to appropriately deal with confounding variables and help identify reactions, and how to interpret data and present the results from a case-control study.
Community or group-randomized trials, which are usually done to evaluate the effect of health promotion effors. It reviews the underlying issues, describes the most widely used research design, and presents the many approaches to analysis that are now available.
This title helps readers address a number of general and specific questions dealing with the case-control and other case-based methods, including questions of how to design and implement a case-control study that minimizes biases, how to analyze the data to appropriately deal with confounding variables and more.
Philosophers have long been fascinated by the connection between cause and effect: are 'causes' things we can experience, or are they concepts provided by our minds? The study of causation goes back to Aristotle, but resurged with David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and is now one of the most important topics in metaphysics. Most of the recent work done in this area has attempted to place causation in a deterministic, scientific, worldview. But what about the unpredictable and chancey world we actually live in: can one theory of causation cover all instances of cause and effect? Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World is a collection of specially written papers by world-class metaphysicians. Its focus is the problem facing the 'reductionist' approach to causation: the attempt to cover all types of causation, deterministic and indeterministic, with one basic theory. Contributors: Stephen Barker, Helen Beebee, Phil Dowe, Dorothy Edgington, Doug Ehring, Chris Hitchcock, Igal Kwart, Paul Noordhof, Murali Ramachandran and Michael Tooley.