Controlled Epidemiological Studies

This book covers classic epidemiological designs that use a reference/control group, including case-control, case-cohort, nested case-control and variations of these designs, such as stratified and two-stage designs. It presents a unified view of these sampling designs as representations of an underlying cohort or target population of interest. This enables various extended designs to be introduced and analysed with a similar approach: extreme sampling on the outcome (extreme case-control design) or on the exposure (exposure-enriched, exposure-density, countermatched), designs that re-use prior controls and augmentation sampling designs. Further extensions exploit aggregate data for efficient cluster sampling, accommodate time-varying exposures and combine matched and unmatched controls. Self-controlled designs, including case-crossover, self-controlled case series and exposure-crossover, are also presented. The test-negative design for vaccine studies and the use of negative controls for bias assessment are introduced and discussed.

This book is intended for graduate students in biostatistics, epidemiology and related disciplines, or for health researchers and data analysts interested in extending their knowledge of study design and data analysis skills.

This book

1. Bridges the gap between epidemiology and the more mathematically oriented biostatistics books.
2. Assembles the wealth of epidemiological knowledge about observational study designs that is scattered over several decades of scientific publications.
3. Illustrates the performance of methods in real research applications.
4. Provides guidelines for implementation in standard software packages (Stata, R).
5. Includes numerous exercises, covering simple mathematical proofs, consideration of proposed or published designs, and practical data analysis.