There is a growing need, especially in legal and policy arenas, for methods to apportion
disease in an individual to the specific “causes” of the disease. In a recent issue,
McElduff and colleagues [
[1]
] propose a model that they purport could be used in litigation to apportion disease
(and ultimately damages) in individuals to multiple “causes” of interest. Their approach,
similar to previously published methods [
2
,
3
], basically apportions disease to a selected set of risk factors based on studies
of external populations. Thus, McElduff et al. [
[1]
] and their predecessors apply population-based attributable risk measures to apportion
disease in individuals. Others have commented on common interpretational pitfalls
of attributable risk measures [
[4]
].To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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References
- Estimating the contribution of individual risk factors to disease in a person with more than one risk factor.J Clin Epidemiol. 2002; 55: 588-592
- Evaluation for compensation of asbestos-exposed individuals:.J Occup Med. 1985; 27: 189-198
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- Relation of probability of causation to relative risk and doubling dose: a methodological error that has become a social problem.Am J Public Health. 1999; 89: 1166-1169
- The privatization of risk.Am J Public Health. 2001; 91: 365-368
- Modern epidemiology. Little, Brown and Company, Boston1986
- Modern epidemiology. Lippincott Raven, Philadelphia1998 (p. 11)
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© 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
