ArticleStatistical methods in medical research2021
The change in estimate method for selecting confounders: A simulation study.
Article in Statistical methods in medical research, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Timing Return-to-Work Counseling: An Observational Study Into the Effect of Time to First Consultation on Return to Work.Journal of occupational rehabilitation · 2025Article
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- Water sources and educational attainment in Colombian adults: evidence from the national nutritional survey.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Identifying confounders and estimating the causal effect of antenatal care on age-specific childhood vaccination.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Identification of confounders and estimating the causal effect of place of birth on age-specific childhood vaccination.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2024Article
- A preliminary study of optimal treatment response rates in patients undergoing hepatic arterial infusion chemotherapy combined with molecular targeting and immunotherapy.Frontiers in immunology · 2024Article
- Correlations between weight perception and overt risk-taking among Canadian adolescents.Canadian journal of public health = Revue canadienne de sante publique · 2023Article
- Causal feature selection using a knowledge graph combining structured knowledge from the biomedical literature and ontologies: A use case studying depression as a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2023Article
- Consumption and Breakfast Patterns in Children and Adolescents with Congenital Heart Disease.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- High Prevalence of Asymptomatic Intracranial Atherosclerosis in Elder Women With Tubal Ligation: Result From a Community-Based Study in Shandong, China.Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine · 2022Article
- Real-life effectiveness of transitioning from paliperidone palmitate 1-monthly to paliperidone palmitate 3-monthly long-acting injectable formulation.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2022Article
- A population-based cohort study for presence of ulceration among cutaneous malignant melanoma subgroups of patients.Frontiers in oncology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundThe change in estimate is a popular approach for selecting confounders in epidemiology. It is recommended in epidemiologic textbooks and articles over significance test of coefficients, but concerns have been raised concerning its validity. Few simulation studies have been conducted to investigate its performance.
methodsAn extensive simulation study was realized to compare different implementations of the change in estimate method. The implementations were also compared when estimating the association of body mass index with diastolic blood pressure in the PROspective Québec Study on Work and Health.
resultsAll methods were susceptible to introduce important bias and to produce confidence intervals that included the true effect much less often than expected in at least some scenarios. Overall mixed results were obtained regarding the accuracy of estimators, as measured by the mean squared error. No implementation adequately differentiated confounders from non-confounders. In the real data analysis, none of the implementation decreased the estimated standard error.
conclusionBased on these results, it is questionable whether change in estimate methods are beneficial in general, considering their low ability to improve the precision of estimates without introducing bias and inability to yield valid confidence intervals or to identify true confounders.
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