ArticleAmerican journal of public health2017
Evaluating Public Health Interventions: 6. Modeling Ratios or Differences? Let the Data Tell Us.
Article in American journal of public health, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Treatment Effect Measures for Culture Conversion Endpoints in Phase IIb Tuberculosis Treatment Trials.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2021Pooled it
- Baseline and longitudinal joint associations of alcohol consumption and obesity with diabetes risk: evaluating multiplicative and additive interactions.Diabetologia · 2026Article
- Statistical methods for cost-effectiveness analysis of left-truncated and right-censored survival data with treatment delays.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series C, Applied statistics · 2025Article
- Comparison of Methods for Analyzing Environmental Mixtures Effects on Survival Outcomes.Current environmental health reports · 2025Review
- A Longitudinal Assessment of Hearing Loss in the World Trade Center General Responder Cohort.Journal of occupational and environmental medicine · 2025Article
- An evolved interpretation of Austin Bradford Hill's causal viewpoints and their influence on epidemiologic methods.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Learning about treatment effects in a new target population under transportability assumptions for relative effect measures.European journal of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Using Parametric g-Computation for Time-to-Event Data and Distributed Lag Models to Identify Critical Exposure Windows for Preterm Birth: An Illustrative Example UsingEnvironmental health perspectives · 2024Article
- Association between gestational exposure to solar activity and pregnancy loss using live births from a Massachusetts-based medical center.Environmental research · 2024Article
- Using Randomized Controlled Trials to Estimate the Effect of Community Interventions for Childhood Asthma.Preventing chronic disease · 2023Article
- Estimating the natural indirect effect and the mediation proportion via the product method.BMC medical research methodology · 2021Article
- Meta-regression methods to characterize evidence strength using meaningful-effect percentages conditional on study characteristics.Research synthesis methods · 2021Article
- Trends in excess mortality associated with atrial fibrillation over 45 years (Framingham Heart Study): community based cohort study.BMJ (Clinical research ed.) · 2020Article
- From Epidemiologic Knowledge to Improved Health: A Vision for Translational Epidemiology.American journal of epidemiology · 2019Review
- Effect heterogeneity and variable selection for standardizing causal effects to a target population.European journal of epidemiology · 2019Article
- Adjusted restricted mean survival times in observational studies.Statistics in medicine · 2019Article
- The Interaction Continuum.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2019Review
- Spiegelman and Zhou Respond.American journal of public health · 2019Article
- Design of non-inferiority randomized trials using the difference in restricted mean survival times.Clinical trials (London, England) · 2018Article
- Evaluating Public Health Interventions: 8. Causal Inference for Time-Invariant Interventions.American journal of public health · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We provide an overview of the relative merits of ratio measures (relative risks, risk ratios, and rate ratios) compared with difference measures (risk and rate differences). We discuss evidence that the multiplicative model often fits the data well, so that rarely are interactions with other risk factors for the outcome observed when one uses a logistic, relative risk, or Cox regression model to estimate the intervention effect. As a consequence, additive models, which estimate the risk or rate difference, will often exhibit interactions. Under these circumstances, absolute measures of effect, such as years of life lost, disability- or quality-adjusted years of life lost, and number needed to treat, will not be externally generalizable to populations other than those with similar risk factor distributions as the population in which the intervention effect was estimated. Nevertheless, these absolute measures are often of the greatest importance in public health decision-making. When studies of high-risk study populations are used to more efficiently estimate effects, these populations will not be representative of the general population's risk factor distribution. The relative homogeneity of ratio versus absolute measures will thus have important implications for the generalizability of results across populations.
Indexed as
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.