Abstract
This paper reviews biostatstical methods in epidemiologic studies for causal inference between a risk factor and a disease. After a brief introduction into measures of exposure effect which are of interest in epidemiologic research, classical epidemiologic designs, i.e. cohort and case-control studies, for effect estimation are illustrated. Recent developments in biostatistics and epidemiology allow to propose new study designs, such as nested case-control, case-cohort, and two-stage case-control studies. Some aspects of causal inference in epidemionlogic observational studies are discussed. Other important topics, misclassification errors, ecological bias, and longitudinal studies, are briefly reviewed.
