Editorial
Role of nested case-control studies in the difficult quest for new coronary risk factors
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
About half of all patients with ischaemic heart disease do not exhibit traditional risk factors.1 Therefore further gains in the control of ischaemic heart disease will require concerted efforts, and the necessary allocation of resources, for current research to evaluate new possible risk factors and preventive interventions. These concerted efforts should proceed on several fronts simultaneously. Basic researchers provide biological mechanisms and answer the crucial question of why an agent or intervention reduces disease or death. Clinicians provide benefits to affected patients through advances in diagnosis and treatment, and formulate hypotheses from their clinical experience. Epidemiologists and statisticians formulate hypotheses from basic, clinical, and descriptive epidemiological studies and test these hypotheses in prospective studies and, where appropriate, in randomised trials.
The ultimate goal of epidemiological studies is to establish whether a
cause-effect relation exists between a putative risk factor and
disease. Making such a judgement involves several steps, the first
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