ReviewDeutsches Arzteblatt international2025
Interaction and Effect Modification in Clinical and Epidemiological Studies: Part 38 of a Series on the Evaluation of Scientific Publications.
Review in Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Subjective cognitive decline and impacts among US cancer survivors: Associations with cancer characteristics and social determinants of health.Journal of cancer survivorship : research and practice · 2026Article
- Methods for modeling gene-environment interplay using polygenic risk scores.Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundA common objective of studies in clinical research is to investigate the effect of an individual factor on the course of a disease. Studying the combined effect of two or more factors on an outcome variable is more complex, as is the question whether an effect varies across subgroups (e.g., men vs. women). The concepts of interaction and effect modification are useful for analyses of this kind.
methodsThis review is based on relevant publications retrieved by a selective search. The concepts of interaction and effect modification are illustrated using examples involving real and fictitious data.
resultsAn interaction is present when, for example, taking two drugs reduces the risk of a disease by an amount that differs from the sum of the individual effects. In contrast, an effect modification is present when, for example, the effect of a drug on the risk of disease varies depending on the presence or absence of a particular genotype. In this article, the concepts of interaction, effect modification, synergism, and antagonism are explained. Interactions can occur on either an additive or a multiplicative scale. Moreover, quantitative measures of interactions on the additive scale are explained, and the potential for misinterpreting evaluations of interactions in regression analyses is discussed.
conclusionThe concepts of interaction and effect modification provide valuable insights for the prevention and treatment of disease.
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.