ArticleEmerging themes in epidemiology2012
Causal diagrams in systems epidemiology.
Article in Emerging themes in epidemiology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- School Green Space and Its Impact on Academic Performance: A Systematic Literature Review.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2019Pooled it
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- No independent associations between physical activity and clinical outcomes among hospitalized patients with moderate to severe COVID-19.Journal of sport and health science · 2021Trial
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- Structural Racism, Geographies of Opportunity, and Maternal Health Inequities: A Dynamic Conceptual Framework.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Therapy without faith: Muslim clients' experience of religious exclusion and minimisation in therapy.Psychology and psychotherapy · 2026Article
- From prediction to intervention: causal digital twins for personalized clinical decision support.Journal of translational medicine · 2026Article
- Causality and exposome.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- A large-scale benchmark for network inference from single-cell perturbation data.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Developing a novel causal inference algorithm for personalized biomedical causal graph learning using meta machine learning.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2024Article
- Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 associates with physical inactivity in a cohort of COVID-19 survivors.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Exploiting the Capabilities of Bayesian Networks for Engineering Risk Assessment: Causal Reasoning through Interventions.Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis · 2022Article
- Is the Way Forward to Step Back? Documenting the Frequency With Which Study Goals Are Misaligned With Study Methods and Interpretations in the Epidemiologic Literature.Epidemiologic reviews · 2022Observational
- Association of sedentary behavior and early engagement in physical activity with low back pain in adolescents: a cross-sectional epidemiological study.European spine journal : official publication of the European Spine Society, the European Spinal Deformity Society, and the European Section of the Cervical Spine Research Society · 2022Article
- Dynamical Modeling as a Tool for Inferring Causation.American journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Advancing sustainable development goals through immunization: a literature review.Globalization and health · 2021Review
- Ultra-processed foods, changes in blood pressure and incidence of hypertension: the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Adult Health (ELSA-Brasil).Public health nutrition · 2021Article
- Novel statistical approaches to identify risk factors for soil-transmitted helminth infection in Timor-Leste.International journal for parasitology · 2021Article
- Injury, Illness, and Training Load in a Professional Contemporary Dance Company: A Prospective Study.Journal of athletic training · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Methods of diagrammatic modelling have been greatly developed in the past two decades. Outside the context of infectious diseases, systematic use of diagrams in epidemiology has been mainly confined to the analysis of a single link: that between a disease outcome and its proximal determinant(s). Transmitted causes ("causes of causes") tend not to be systematically analysed.The infectious disease epidemiology modelling tradition models the human population in its environment, typically with the exposure-health relationship and the determinants of exposure being considered at individual and group/ecological levels, respectively. Some properties of the resulting systems are quite general, and are seen in unrelated contexts such as biochemical pathways. Confining analysis to a single link misses the opportunity to discover such properties.The structure of a causal diagram is derived from knowledge about how the world works, as well as from statistical evidence. A single diagram can be used to characterise a whole research area, not just a single analysis - although this depends on the degree of consistency of the causal relationships between different populations - and can therefore be used to integrate multiple datasets.Additional advantages of system-wide models include: the use of instrumental variables - now emerging as an important technique in epidemiology in the context of mendelian randomisation, but under-used in the exploitation of "natural experiments"; the explicit use of change models, which have advantages with respect to inferring causation; and in the detection and elucidation of feedback.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.