ArticleAmerican journal of epidemiology2021
Invited Commentary: Sibling-Comparison Designs, Are They Worth the Effort?
Article in American journal of epidemiology, 2021. 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.
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Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Benefits and Risks of Antidepressant Drugs During Pregnancy: A Systematic Review of Meta-analyses.Paediatric drugs · 2023Pooled it
- Unraveling the multifaceted relationship between creativity and mental health with longitudinal analyses of genotyped twins.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Gestational Age and Childhood Educational Outcomes in Primary and High School Years.JAMA network open · 2026Article
- Peripubertal pregnancies and associations with health and developmental outcomes in offspring during late adolescence and adulthood: sibling-comparison register study.International journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- Investigating relationships between loneliness, social isolation and health.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Genetically Informed Research Designs in Perinatal Pharmacoepidemiology: A Methodological Overview.Drug safety · 2026Review
- Maternal asthma activity and offspring asthma: a linked-data population study in Australia and Sweden.BMJ open respiratory research · 2026Article
- Increased Risk of Disabilities in Children and Adolescents With Congenital Heart Disease of Any Severity.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2026Article
- Selection Biases in Perinatal Research: A Comparison of Inverse Probability Weighting, Instrumental Variable and Sibling-Comparison Design.Paediatric and perinatal epidemiology · 2026Article
- Maternal Gestational Low-Grade Inflammation and the Risk of Anorexia Nervosa in Daughters.The International journal of eating disorders · 2026Article
- Prenatal ozone exposure and risk of intellectual disability.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2026Article
- Associations between cannabis use frequency and suicidal thoughts and behaviors: A clinical longitudinal sibling study.Addictive behaviors reports · 2025Article
- Maternal body mass index in early pregnancy and autism in offspring: a population-based cohort study in Sweden and Denmark.BMC medicine · 2025Article
- Fetal programming of early-onset type 2 diabetes: a Swedish nationwide cohort and sibling analysis.European journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Sibling Control Analysis of Perinatal Health and Family Environment Factors Related to Childhood ADHD Symptoms.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Trends in physical functioning in acute lymphoblastic leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivors across three decades.Journal of cancer survivorship : research and practice · 2025Observational
- Gestational Age and Cognitive Development in Childhood.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Familial confounding in the associations between maternal health and autism.Nature medicine · 2025Article
- Perinatal health outcomes of offspring of internal migrant women according to human development index: a registry-based cohort study of over 10 million live births from Brazil.Lancet regional health. Americas · 2025Article
- Associations of maternal blood biomarkers of prenatal APAP exposure with placental gene expression and child attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.Nature. Mental health · 2025Article
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Abstract
In this issue of the Journal, von Ehrenstein et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2021;190(5):728-737) add to the large and growing literature on the potentially causal association between prenatal exposure to maternal smoking and neuropsychiatric health. In addition to statewide, prospectively collected data, a particular strength was their ability to perform a sibling-comparison design, contrasting the rate of autism spectrum disorder in siblings discordantly exposed to maternal smoking. Unfortunately, the estimate from the sibling pairs could neither confirm nor refute the conclusions based on the full cohort. Interpretation was hampered by broad confidence limits, and even had power been higher, the authors acknowledge a range of potential biases that would have made it difficult to draw any firm conclusions from a similarity or difference in the sibling-pair estimate and estimate from the full cohort. Was the addition of the sibling comparison actually worth the effort? In this commentary, I will briefly summarize the benefits and limitations of this design, and, with some caveats, argue that its inclusion in the study by von Ehrenstein et al. was indeed a strength and not just an ornamentation.
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