AbstractClinicians, researchers, regulators, and other decision-makers increasingly rely on evidence from real-world data (RWD), including data routinely accumulating in health and administrative databases. RWD studies often rely on algorithms to operationalize variable definitions. An algorithm is a combination of codes or concepts used to identify...

AbstractChildhood adversity is an important risk factor for adverse health across the life course. Epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation (DNAm), are one hypothesized mechanism linking adversity to disease susceptibility. Yet, few studies have determined whether adversity-related DNAm alterations are causally related to future health outcomes...

AbstractThe evidence from previous studies of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] and ovarian cancer risk are not conclusive. However, 25(OH)D was generally only measured in late adulthood, which may not capture the etiologically relevant exposure periods. We investigated predicted 25(OH)D over the adult lifetime in relation to ovarian cancer risk in...

AbstractWe spend a great deal of time on confounding in our teaching, in our methods development and in our assessment of study results. This may give the impression that uncontrolled confounding is the biggest problem that observational epidemiology faces, when in fact, other sources of bias such as selection bias, measurement error, missing data,...

Uncoded AnaphylaxisICD10 sensitivityEHR data

AbstractIn 2023, Martinez et al. examined trends in the inclusion, conceptualization, operationalization and analysis of race and ethnicity among studies published in US epidemiology journals. Based on a random sample of papers (N=1,050) published from 1995-2018, the authors describe the treatment of race, ethnicity, and ethnorace in the analytic sample...