Biases Inherent in Studies of Coffee Consumption in Early Pregnancy and the Risks of Subsequent Events
Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 1731 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445, USA
Nutrients 2018, 10(9), 1152; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10091152
Received: 24 July 2018 / Revised: 18 August 2018 / Accepted: 21 August 2018 / Published: 23 August 2018
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Impact of Caffeine and Coffee on Human Health)
Consumption of coffee by women early in their pregnancy has been viewed as potentially increasing the risk of miscarriage, low birth weight, and childhood leukemias. Many of these reports of epidemiologic studies have not acknowledged the potential biases inherent in studying the relationship between early-pregnancy-coffee consumption and subsequent events. I discuss five of these biases, recall bias, misclassification, residual confounding, reverse causation, and publication bias. Each might account for claims that attribute adversities to early-pregnancy-coffee consumption. To what extent these biases can be avoided remains to be determined. As a minimum, these biases need to be acknowledged wherever they might account for what is reported.
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Keywords:
epidemiology; bias; causation; coffee; pregnancy
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MDPI and ACS Style
Leviton, A. Biases Inherent in Studies of Coffee Consumption in Early Pregnancy and the Risks of Subsequent Events. Nutrients 2018, 10, 1152. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10091152
AMA Style
Leviton A. Biases Inherent in Studies of Coffee Consumption in Early Pregnancy and the Risks of Subsequent Events. Nutrients. 2018; 10(9):1152. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10091152
Chicago/Turabian StyleLeviton, Alan. 2018. "Biases Inherent in Studies of Coffee Consumption in Early Pregnancy and the Risks of Subsequent Events" Nutrients 10, no. 9: 1152. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu10091152
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