Schwaber Mitchell J, Carmeli Yehuda
Division of Epidemiology, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Crit Care. 2006;10(5):164. doi: 10.1186/cc5019.
Outcomes studies of infections with resistant bacteria often do not account appropriately for intermediate variables--events in the causal pathway between the exposure and the outcome--when controlling for confounders. We discuss how failure to distinguish between confounders and intermediate variables can bias the analysis, and we address methods of approaching this issue.
耐药菌感染的结果研究在控制混杂因素时,往往没有恰当地考虑中间变量,即暴露与结果之间因果路径上的事件。我们讨论了未能区分混杂因素和中间变量如何导致分析产生偏差,并阐述了解决该问题的方法。