Applying the E-value to Assess the Robustness of Epidemiologic Fields of Inquiry to Unmeasured Confounding.

Applying the E-value to Assess the Robustness of Epidemiologic Fields of Inquiry to Unmeasured Confounding. Am J Epidemiol. 2019 Mar 15;: Authors: Trinquart L, Erlinger AL, Petersen JM, Fox M, Galea S Abstract We explored the use of the E-value to gauge the robustness of fields of epidemiological inquiry to unmeasured confounding. We surveyed nutrition and air pollution studies that found statistically significant associations between exposures and incident outcomes. For 100 studies in each field, we extracted adjusted relative effect estimates and associated confidence intervals (95% CI). We inverted estimates where necessary so that all effects were greater than 1. We calculated E-values for both the effect estimate and the lower limit of 95%CI. Nutrition studies were smaller than air pollution studies (median 40,652 vs. 72,460 participants per study). More than 90% of nutrition studies categorized the exposure, whereas 89% of air pollution studies analyzed the exposure as a continuous variable. The median relative effect was 1.33 in nutrition and 1.16 in air pollution. The corresponding median E-value for the estimate was 2.00 and 1.59, respectively. E-values for the 95%CI had median values of 1.39 and 1.26, respectively. Little to moderate unmeasured confounding could explain away most observed associations. The E-value will necessarily be larger for smaller studies that reach statistical significance, making cross-field comparis...
Source: Am J Epidemiol - Category: Epidemiology Authors: Tags: Am J Epidemiol Source Type: research