In epidemiology, the “cause” is an agent (microbial germs, polluted water, smoking, etc.) that modifies health, and the “effect” describes the the way that the health is changed by the agent. The agent is often potentially pathogenic (in which case it is known as a “risk factor”).
The effect is therefore effectively a risk comparison. We can define two different types of risk in this context:
The absolute effect of a cause expresses the increase in the risk or the additional number of cases of illness that result or could result from exposure to this cause. It is measured by the attributable risk and its derivatives.
The relative effect of a cause expresses the strength of the association between the causal agent and the illness.
A cause that produces an effect by itself is called sufficient.
HISTORY
The terms “cause” and “effect” were defined at the birth of epidemiology, which occurred in the seventeenth century.
MATHEMATICAL ASPECTS
Formally, we have:
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REFERENCES
Lilienfeld, A.M., Lilienfeld, D.E.: Foundations of Epidemiology, 2nd edn. Clarendon, Oxford (1980)
MacMahon, B., Pugh, T.F.: Epidemiology: Principles and Methods. Little Brown, Boston, MA (1970)
Morabia, A.: Epidemiologie Causale. Editions Médecine et Hygiène, Geneva (1996)
Rothmann, J.K.: Epidemiology. An Introduction. Oxford University Press (2002)
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(2008). Cause and Effect in Epidemiology. In: The Concise Encyclopedia of Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-32833-1_48
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