Key result
Clinical guide outlines how to interpret hazard and odds ratios across trials and observational studies.
Why the study?
Clinicians need to understand and interpret various measures of association reported in medical literature to apply study results to clinical practice.
Design
Review of measures of association in clinical research study designs
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Guides accurate interpretation of HRs and ORs across trials and observational data; leaves open broader validation in cardiology-specific contexts.
When reading medical literature as a clinician, many different measures of association are presented. To judge whether results of studies can be applied to clinical practice, it is essential to understand and to be able to interpret the measure of association reported in the article. In this paper, we will present how to deal with the most commonly used measures of association including the risk and rate difference, number needed to treat, risk and rate ratio, hazard ratio and odds ratio. By means of examples, we will discuss the different measures of association for the three main study designs used in clinical research: randomized controlled trial, observational cohort study and case-control study.
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Knol et al. (2011) reported a review. This paper provides a clinical guide on interpreting common measures of association, such as hazard ratios and odds ratios, across randomized trials and observational studies.
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