Vandenbroucke Jan P
Leiden University Medical Centre.
Soz Praventivmed. 2002;47(4):216-24. doi: 10.1007/BF01326402.
Confounding is a basic problem of comparability--and therefore has always been present in science. Originally a plain English word, it acquired more specific meanings in epidemiologic thinking about experimental and non-experimental research. The use of the word can be traced to Fisher. The concept was developed more fully in social science research, among others by Kish. Landmark developments in epidemiology in the second half of the 20th century were by Cornfield and by Miettinen. These developments emphasised that reasoning about confounding is almost entirely an a priori process that we have to impose upon the data and the data-analysis to arrive at a meaningful interpretation. The problems of confounding present their old challenges again in recent applications to genetic epidemiology.
混杂是可比性的一个基本问题，因此在科学领域一直存在。它最初是一个普通的英语单词，在流行病学对实验性和非实验性研究的思考中获得了更具体的含义。这个词的使用可以追溯到费舍尔。该概念在社会科学研究等领域得到了更充分的发展，其中包括基什的贡献。20世纪下半叶流行病学的里程碑式发展来自科恩菲尔德和米耶蒂宁。这些发展强调，关于混杂的推理几乎完全是一个先验过程，我们必须将其应用于数据和数据分析，以获得有意义的解释。在最近应用于遗传流行病学的过程中，混杂问题再次带来了旧有的挑战。
