Methodological Considerations for Designing Observational Public Health Studies

Dear Colleagues,

Recently, the phenomenon of case and control selection and its corresponding impacts have sparked heated debate. The paradigm of description of case and control groups, besides good selection of them based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, is one of the most important aspects of performing a good case control study in public health. We emphasize that this paradigm can affect the results of studies and the conclusions that researchers and clinicians could then pick up and employ in their practice. Therefore, we decided to clarify the effect of changing the control and case group definition on the results, odds ratio (OR) and its confident intervals in two analytical articles in our large database. It will be constructive for any researcher in this field and every researcher who is interested in case-control studies.

Dr. Hassan Doosti
Prof. Dr. Shahram Agah
Prof. Dr. Awat Feizi
Guest Editors

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