When can odds ratios mislead?

Making sense of odds and odds ratios.

Odds and odds ratios are hard for many clinicians to understand. Odds are the probability of an event occurring divided by the probability of the event not occurring. An odds ratio is the odds of the event in one group, for example, those exposed to a drug, divided by the odds in another group not exposed. Odds ratios always exaggerate the true relative risk to some degree. When the probability...

Mischievous Odds Ratios

Estimation of cumulative odds ratios.

PURPOSE Standard estimation of ordered odds ratios requires the constraint that the etiologic effects of exposure are homogenous across thresholds of the ordered response. We present a method to relax this often-unrealistic constraint. METHODS The kernel of the proposed method is the expansion of observed data into "person-thresholds." Using standard statistical software, for each subject we ...

Risk ratios and odds ratios--what are they?

A risk ratio (sometimes called relative risk, both abbreviated to RR) and an odds ratio (OR) are ways of expressing a comparison between two proportions. For example, in this paper, there are two randomised groups in the trial, women in the lateral position and women in the supported sitting position in the passive second stage of labour. The authors wanted to compare the proportions of instrum...

The relative merits of risk ratios and odds ratios.

When a study outcome is rare in all strata used for an analysis, the odds ratio estimate of causal effects will approximate the risk ratio; therefore, odds ratios from most case-control studies can be interpreted as risk ratios. However, if a study outcome is common, the odds ratio will be further from 1 than the risk ratio. There is debate regarding the merits of risk ratios compared with odds...