Invited Commentary: Confounding, Measurement Error, and Publication Bias in Studies of Passive Smoking

Invited commentary: confounding, measurement error, and publication bias in studies of passive smoking.

In December 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared that environmental tobacco smoke is a class A human carcinogen, responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths per year in nonsmokers (1). Although evidence is still accumulating on the role of passive smoking in coronary heart disease among nonsmokers (2, 3), if this association is real, then the total burden of de...

Invited commentary: understanding bias amplification.

In choosing covariates for adjustment or inclusion in propensity score analysis, researchers must weigh the benefit of reducing confounding bias carried by those covariates against the risk of amplifying residual bias carried by unmeasured confounders. The latter is characteristic of covariates that act like instrumental variables-that is, variables that are more strongly associated with the ex...

Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias.

Invited commentary: The use of sibship studies to detect familial confounding.

The authors discuss how the sibship design can be used to detect and control for familial confounding. Family-level confounding is especially problematic when estimating modest individual-level effects in the presence of familial confounders with large effects. This circumstance arises frequently in studies which relate indicators of fetal growth, such as birth weight, to outcomes that are stro...

Invited Commentary Invited Commentary: Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and Allergies: Biology or Bias?

Previous epidemiologic studies have shown an inverse association between a personal history of atopy/allergies, both overall and among asthma, eczema, and hay fever investigated separately, and childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) with some consistency; however, in most of these studies, exposure data were collected by maternal interview. Now, in a population-based and records-based stu...