Educational note: addressing special cases of bias that frequently occur in perinatal epidemiology.
Int J Epidemiol
; 50(1): 337-345, 2021 03 03.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33367719
ABSTRACT
The epidemiologic study of pregnancy and birth outcomes may be hindered by several unique and challenging issues. Pregnancy is a time-limited period in which severe cohort attrition takes place between conception and birth and adverse outcomes are complex and multi-factorial. Biases span those familiar to epidemiologists selection, confounding and information biases. Specific challenges include conditioning on potential intermediates, how to treat race/ethnicity, and influential windows of prolonged, seasonal and potentially time-varying exposures. Researchers studying perinatal outcomes should be cognizant of the potential pitfalls due to these factors and address their implications with respect to formulating questions of interest, choice of an appropriate analysis approach and interpretations of findings given assumptions. In this article, we catalogue some of the more important potential sources of bias in perinatal epidemiology that have more recently gained attention in the literature, provide the epidemiologic context behind each issue and propose practices for dealing with each issue to the extent possible.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Bias
Type of study:
Etiology_studies
/
Incidence_studies
/
Observational_studies
/
Risk_factors_studies
/
Screening_studies
Limits:
Female
/
Humans
/
Pregnancy
Language:
En
Journal:
Int J Epidemiol
Year:
2021
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country: