Confounding in longitudinal studies in addiction treatment research

Confounding in longitudinal studies in addiction treatment research

Background: The effectiveness of treatment for people with substance use disorders is usually examined using longitudinal cohorts. In these studies, treatment is often considered as a time-varying exposure. The aim of this commentary is to examine confounding in this context, when the confounding variable is time-invariant and when it is time-varying. Method: Types of confounding are described ...

Methodological issues of confounding in analytical epidemiologic studies

Background: Confounding can be thought of as mixing the effect of exposure on the risk of disease with a third factor which distorts the measure of association such as risk ratio or odds ratio. This bias arises because of complex functional relationship of confounder with both exposure and disease (outcome). In this article, we provided a conceptual framework review of confounding issues in epi...

Confounding in health research.

Consideration of confounding is fundamental to the design, analysis, and interpretation of studies intended to estimate causal effects. Unfortunately, the word confounding has been used synonymously with several other terms, and it has been used to refer to at least four distinct concepts. This paper provides an overview of confounding and related concepts based on a counterfactual model of cau...

Ethical issues in the conduct of longitudinal studies of addiction treatment.

Many complex ethical issues arise in the day-to-day conduct of longitudinal studies of addiction treatment. These issues are rooted, in part, in the sustained and potentially ambiguous relationship between research staff and study participants, the frequently changing clinical and legal status of study participants, the assertive methods required to generate high follow-up rates, and the numero...

Understanding confounding in research.