Department of Communication and Economics, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Reggio, Emilia, Italy.
Department of Philosophy I, Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
J Eval Clin Pract. 2022 Oct;28(5):752-772. doi: 10.1111/jep.13697. Epub 2022 Jun 26.
RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: Recent controversies about dietary advice concerning meat demonstrate that aggregating the available evidence to assess a putative causal link between food and cancer is a challenging enterprise.
We show how a tool developed for assessing putative causal links between drugs and adverse drug reactions, E-Synthesis, can be applied for food carcinogenicity assessments. The application is demonstrated on the putative causal relationship between processed meat consumption and cancer.
The output of the assessment is a Bayesian probability that processed meat consumption causes cancer. This Bayesian probability is calculated from a Bayesian network model, which incorporates a representation of Bradford Hill's Guidelines as probabilistic indicators of causality. We show how to determine probabilities of indicators of causality for food carcinogenicity assessments based on assessments of the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
We find that E-Synthesis is a tool well-suited for food carcinogenicity assessments, as it enables a graphical representation of lines and weights of evidence, offers the possibility to make a great number of judgements explicit and transparent, outputs a probability of causality suitable for decision making and is flexible to aggregate different kinds of evidence.
原理、目的和目标：最近关于肉类饮食建议的争议表明，汇总现有证据来评估食物与癌症之间可能存在的因果关系是一项具有挑战性的工作。
我们展示了如何将专门用于评估药物和药物不良反应之间可能存在的因果关系的工具 E-Synthesis 应用于食物致癌性评估。该应用以加工肉类消费与癌症之间可能存在的因果关系为例进行了演示。
评估的输出是加工肉类消费导致癌症的贝叶斯概率。该贝叶斯概率是从贝叶斯网络模型计算得出的，该模型纳入了布拉德福德·希尔指南的表示形式，作为因果关系的概率指标。我们展示了如何基于国际癌症研究机构的评估，为食物致癌性评估确定因果关系指标的概率。
我们发现 E-Synthesis 非常适合用于食物致癌性评估，因为它可以图形化表示证据的线索和权重，提供明确和透明地进行大量判断的可能性，输出适合决策的因果关系概率，并且灵活适用于汇总不同类型的证据。
