Should Controls With Respiratory Symptoms Be Excluded From Case-Control Studies of Pneumonia Etiology? Reflections From the PERCH Study

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Clin Infect Dis
• Personal Author:
  Higdon, Melissa M. ; Hammitt, Laura L. ; Deloria Knoll, Maria ; Baggett, Henry C. ; Brooks, W. Abdullah ; Howie, Stephen R. C. ; Kotloff, Karen L. ; Levine, Orin S. ; Madhi, Shabir A. ; Murdoch, David R. ; Scott, J. Anthony G. ; Thea, Donald M. ; Driscoll, Amanda J. ; Karron, Ruth A. ; Park, Daniel E. ; Prosperi, Christine ; Zeger, Scott L. ; O’Brien, Katherine L. ; Feikin, Daniel R.
• Corporate Authors:
  PERCH Study Group
• Description:
  Many pneumonia etiology case-control studies exclude controls with respiratory illness from enrollment or analyses. Herein we argue that selecting controls regardless of respiratory symptoms provides the least biased estimates of pneumonia etiology. We review 3 reasons investigators may choose to exclude controls with respiratory symptoms in light of epidemiologic principles of control selection and present data from the Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) study where relevant to assess their validity. We conclude that exclusion of controls with respiratory symptoms will result in biased estimates of etiology. Randomly selected community controls, with or without respiratory symptoms, as long as they do not meet the criteria for case-defining pneumonia, are most representative of the general population from which cases arose and the least subject to selection bias.
• Subjects:
  Child Data Interpretation, Statistical Epidemiologic Research Design Female Humans Male Multicenter Studies As Topic Pneumonia Pneumonia, Bacterial Pneumonia, Viral Research Design Respiratory Tract Infections Risk Factors Selection Bias

  More +
• Source:
  Clin Infect Dis. 2017; 64(Suppl 3):S205-S212.
• Pubmed ID:
  28575354
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC5447853
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Name as Subject:
  Pneumonia Etiology Research for Child Health
• Volume:
  64
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:18148394587a342500b978529e0f38b444b8674beac6d2bbf0d825c74e2326ce
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/46180/cdc_46180_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 525.24 KB ]