Work

Propensity scores for confounder adjustment when assessing the effects of medical interventions using nonexperimental study designs

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: Treatment effects, especially when comparing two or more therapeutic alternatives as in comparative effectiveness research, are likely to be heterogeneous across age, gender, co-morbidities and co-medications. Propensity scores (PSs), an alternative to multivariable outcome models to control for measured confounding, have specific advantages in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. Implementing PSs using matching or weighting allows us to estimate different overall treatment effects in differently defined populations. Heterogeneous treatment effects can also be due to unmeasured confounding concentrated in those treated contrary to prediction. Sensitivity analyses based on PSs can help to assess such unmeasured confounding. PSs should be considered a primary or secondary analytic strategy in nonexperimental medical research, including pharmacoepidemiology and nonexperimental comparative effectiveness research.

Source: Journal of Internal Medicine

DOI: 10.1111/joim.12197

Authors: T. Stürmer, R. Wyss, R. J. Glynn, M. A. Brookhart

Institutions: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard University

Language: English

Topic: Advanced Causal Inference Techniques

Subfield: Statistics and Probability

Field: Mathematics

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, National Cancer Institute