Alcohol Research Group, Public Health Institute, Emeryville, USA.
Drug Alcohol Rev. 2013 Sep;32(5):512-8. doi: 10.1111/dar.12042. Epub 2013 Apr 10.
Prior work suggests that recall bias may be a threat to the validity of relative risk estimation of injury due to alcohol consumption, when the case-crossover method is used based on drinking during the same six hours period the week prior to injury as the control period. This work explores the issue of alcohol recall bias used in the case-crossover design.
Data were collected on injury patients from emergency room studies across six countries (Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama and Canada), conducted in 2009-2011, each with n ≈ 500 except Canada (n = 249). Recall bias was evaluated comparing drinking during two control periods: the same six hours period the day before versus the week before injury.
A greater likelihood of drinking yesterday compared with last week was seen using data from the Dominican Republic, while lower likelihood of drinking yesterday was found in Guatemala and Nicaragua. When the data from all six countries were combined, no differential drinking between the two control periods was observed.
These findings are in contrast to earlier studies showing a downward recall bias of drinking, and suggest that it may be premature to dismiss the last week case-crossover method as a valid approach to estimating risk of injury related to drinking. However, the heterogeneity across countries suggests that there may be some unexplained measurement error beyond random sampling error.
先前的研究表明，当使用病例交叉法基于受伤前一周的同一六小时内饮酒作为对照期来估计因饮酒导致的伤害的相对风险时，回忆偏倚可能对伤害的相对风险估计的有效性构成威胁。本研究探讨了病例交叉设计中使用的酒精回忆偏倚问题。
2009 年至 2011 年期间，在多米尼加共和国、危地马拉、圭亚那、尼加拉瓜、巴拿马和加拿大六个国家的急诊室研究中收集了伤害患者的数据，除了加拿大（n=249）外，每个国家的 n≈500。通过比较前一天和受伤前一周的同一六小时内饮酒情况来评估回忆偏倚。
来自多米尼加共和国的数据显示，与上周相比，昨天饮酒的可能性更大，而危地马拉和尼加拉瓜的数据显示昨天饮酒的可能性较小。当将来自六个国家的数据合并时，没有观察到两个对照期之间的饮酒差异。
这些发现与早期研究显示的饮酒向下回忆偏倚相反，表明将上周的病例交叉法作为估计与饮酒相关的伤害风险的有效方法可能还为时过早。然而，各国之间的异质性表明，除了随机抽样误差之外，可能还有一些未解释的测量误差。
