Garrido Melissa M
Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center, James J. Peters VA Medical Center, Bronx, New York, USA; Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA.
J Pain Symptom Manage. 2014 Oct;48(4):711-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2014.05.014. Epub 2014 Jun 14.
When conducting research on pain and symptom management interventions for seriously ill individuals, randomized controlled trials are not always feasible or ethical to conduct. Secondary analyses of observational data sets that include information on treatments experienced and outcomes for individuals who did and did not receive a given treatment can be conducted, but confounding because of selection bias can obscure the treatment effect in which one is interested. Propensity scores provide a way to adjust for observable characteristics that differ between treatment and comparison groups. This article provides conceptual guidance in addition to an empirical example to illustrate two areas of propensity score analysis that often lead to confusion in practice: covariate selection and interpretation of resultant treatment effects.
在对重症患者的疼痛和症状管理干预措施进行研究时，进行随机对照试验并不总是可行或符合伦理的。可以对观察数据集进行二次分析，这些数据集包含接受和未接受特定治疗的个体的治疗经历和结果信息，但由于选择偏倚导致的混杂因素可能会掩盖人们感兴趣的治疗效果。倾向得分提供了一种方法，用于调整治疗组和对照组之间存在差异的可观察特征。本文除了提供一个实证例子外，还提供了概念指导，以说明倾向得分分析中两个在实践中经常导致混淆的领域：协变量选择和所得治疗效果的解释。
