Author Description

This book is a revised and substantially expanded successor to Causal Relationships in Medicine: A Practical System for Critical Appraisal, published by Oxford in 1988. This new edition has been thoroughly rewritten and new sections on meta-analysis, evidence-based medicine and misclassification have been added. The appraisal system proposed here is applicable to studies involving randomized clinical trials, and epidemiologic studies of the survey, cohort, and case control design. It covers all major study designs used in clinical medicine and public health to assess the etiology of conditions, the efficacy of treatment, and the outcomes of health management.The book presents a logical system of critical appraisal, from the description of the nature of the study and its results to the consideration of observational bias, the effects of extraneous factors, chance variation, the types of positive evidence expected where causal relationships exist and the issues of generalization of the results. Each chapter concludes with a summary and a set of self-test questions, with answer key. The book has two unique features. One is the presentation of six important studies illustrating randomized trials, prospective and retrospective cohort designs and case control designs, each with a critical appraisal. The other is the summary of major statistical methods used in the analysis of each study design in a series of logical tables with worked examples.