CNR-IFC, Clinical Epidemiology and Physiopathology of Renal Diseases and Hypertension, Reggio Calabria, Italy.
ERA-EDTA Registry, Department of Medical Informatics, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Nephrol Dial Transplant. 2017 Apr 1;32(suppl_2):ii19-ii22. doi: 10.1093/ndt/gfw439.
Cross-sectional studies represent the second line of evidence (after case reports) in the ladder of evidence aimed at defining disease aetiology. This study design is used to generate hypotheses about the determinants of a given disease but also to investigate the accuracy of diagnostic tests and to assess the burden of a given disease in a population. The intrinsic limitation of cross-sectional studies, when applied to generate aetiological hypotheses, is that both the exposure under investigation and the disease of interest are measured at the same point in time. For this reason, generally the cross-sectional design does not provide definitive proofs about cause-and-effect relationships. An advantage of cross-sectional studies in aetiological and diagnostic research is that they allow researchers to consider many different putative risk factors/diagnostic markers at the same time. For example, in a hypothetical study aimed at generating hypotheses about the risk factors for left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) in patients with chronic kidney disease, investigators could look at several risk factors as potential determinants of LVH (age, gender, cholesterol, blood pressure, inflammation, etc.) with minimal or no additional costs. In this article, we make examples derived from the nephrology literature to show the usefulness of cross-sectional studies in clinical and epidemiological research.
横断面研究是证据阶梯中用于定义疾病病因的第二线证据（仅次于病例报告）。这种研究设计用于生成关于特定疾病决定因素的假设，也可用于研究诊断测试的准确性，并评估特定疾病在人群中的负担。当应用于生成病因假设时，横断面研究的内在局限性在于，所研究的暴露和感兴趣的疾病都在同一时间点进行测量。因此，横断面设计通常不能提供因果关系的明确证据。横断面研究在病因学和诊断研究中的一个优势是，它们允许研究人员同时考虑许多不同的潜在风险因素/诊断标志物。例如，在一项旨在生成慢性肾脏病患者左心室肥厚（LVH）危险因素假设的假设性研究中，研究人员可以将几个风险因素视为 LVH 的潜在决定因素（年龄、性别、胆固醇、血压、炎症等），只需花费最小或无需额外费用。在本文中，我们将举例说明来自肾脏病学文献的示例，以展示横断面研究在临床和流行病学研究中的有用性。
