Department of Surgery, Division of Neurosurgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Clin Spine Surg. 2021 Feb 1;34(1):22-24. doi: 10.1097/BSD.0000000000001055.
In using observational, nonrandomized data, there is often interest in studying the effect of a particular treatment on a specific outcome. However, the imbalance of potential confounding variables between the treatment groups can distort the relationship between treatment and outcome. Propensity score matching is one, increasingly utilized, method to help account for such imbalances, allowing for a more accurate estimation of the influence of treatment on outcome. In this paper, we provide the clinician with an overview of propensity score matching techniques and provide a practical example of how this has been used in clinical research relevant to spine surgery.
在使用观察性、非随机数据时，人们通常有兴趣研究特定治疗对特定结果的影响。然而，治疗组之间潜在混杂变量的不平衡会扭曲治疗与结果之间的关系。倾向评分匹配是一种越来越被利用的方法，可以帮助解释这种不平衡，从而更准确地估计治疗对结果的影响。在本文中，我们为临床医生提供了倾向评分匹配技术的概述，并提供了一个实际的例子，说明如何将其用于与脊柱外科相关的临床研究。
