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Fundamentals of epidemiology - an evolving text - Are you looking ...

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Appendix — Relating risk factors to health outcomes<br />

WARNING: this chapter has recently been converted to MS Word, so some algebraic errors may<br />

have been introduced.<br />

Estimating exposure-specific incidence <strong>an</strong>d attributable risk from a casecontrol<br />

when the crude incidence is known<br />

This procedure makes use <strong>of</strong> the fact that the crude incidence c<strong>an</strong> be expressed as a weighted<br />

average <strong>of</strong> exposure-specific incidences:<br />

where:<br />

I = P1I1 + P0I0<br />

I = crude incidence<br />

I1 = incidence in exposed population<br />

I0 = incidence in unexposed population<br />

P1 = proportion <strong>of</strong> the population that is exposed<br />

P0 = proportion <strong>of</strong> the population that is unexposed<br />

Since the RR (relative risk, CIR, IDR) = I1/I0, it is possible to substitute RR x I0 for I1 in the above<br />

expression:<br />

I = P1 × RR × I0 + P0I0<br />

Similarly, since P1 + P0 = 1, we c<strong>an</strong> substitute for 1 - P1 for P0:<br />

I = P1 × RR × I0 + (1 – P1) × I0<br />

Solving for I0 yields:<br />

I0<br />

I I<br />

= ———————— = ——————<br />

P1 x RR + (1 – P1) 1 + P1 (RR – 1)<br />

Since for a rare disease we c<strong>an</strong> estimate RR by using OR, the final formula is:<br />

_____________________________________________________________________________________________<br />

www.epidemiolog.net, © Victor J. Schoenbach 2000 7. Relating risk factors to health - 202<br />

rev. 10/9/2000, 5/8/2001, 2/19/2002, 4/26/2002

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