Department of Dental Public Health and Policy, School of Dentistry, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
Division of Epidemiology, Department of Family Medicine, School of Medicine, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA.
Community Dent Oral Epidemiol. 2021 Apr;49(2):103-109. doi: 10.1111/cdoe.12617. Epub 2020 Dec 26.
Coined by Westreich and Greenland in 2013, Table 2 fallacy refers to the practice of reporting estimates of the primary exposure and adjustment covariates derived from a single model on the same table. This study seeks to describe the extent to which Table 2 fallacy is present in the oral health literature and provide recommendations on presenting findings from multivariable-adjusted models and/or interpretation of adjustment covariate estimates that are not the primary exposure.
We conducted a scoping review in PubMed and Scopus of human observational studies published in 4 oral health journals (JDR-CTR, CDOE, JPHD, BMC Oral Health) starting in 2013 until the end of 2018. The resulting articles were exported into Excel and were either included or excluded for full-text review based on six criteria. After categorizing the articles, we exported and summarized the results in SAS.
A total of 1358 articles were initially screened of which 937 articles were excluded based on title or abstract for being animal studies, systematic reviews or meta-analysis, prediction models or descriptive studies. The remaining 421 articles were eligible for full text reviewed of which, 189 (45%) committed Table 2 fallacy. The prevalence of table 2 fallacy appears high in the oral health literature.
The problem of presenting multiple effect estimates derived from a single model in the same table is that it inadvertently encourages the reader to interpret all estimates the same way, often as total effects. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
2013 年，Westreich 和 Greenland 创造了“表 2 谬误”一词，指的是在同一表格中报告来自单一模型的主要暴露因素和调整协变量的估计值的做法。本研究旨在描述表 2 谬误在口腔健康文献中的存在程度，并就呈现多变量调整模型的结果和/或解释不是主要暴露因素的调整协变量估计值提供建议。
我们在 PubMed 和 Scopus 中对 2013 年至 2018 年底发表在 4 种口腔健康期刊（JDR-CTR、CDOE、JPHD、BMC 口腔健康）的人类观察性研究进行了范围综述。将生成的文章导出到 Excel 中，并根据六个标准进行纳入或排除全文审查。在对文章进行分类后，我们在 SAS 中导出并总结了结果。
最初筛选了 1358 篇文章，其中 937 篇基于标题或摘要被排除在外，因为它们是动物研究、系统评价或荟萃分析、预测模型或描述性研究。其余 421 篇文章符合全文审查条件，其中 189 篇（45%）存在表 2 谬误。表 2 谬误在口腔健康文献中的发生率似乎很高。
在同一表格中呈现来自单一模型的多个效应估计值的问题在于，它无意中鼓励读者以相同的方式解释所有估计值，通常是总效应。讨论了其影响和建议。
