Translating Risk Ratios, Baseline Incidence, and Proportions Diseased to Correlations and Chi-Squared Statistics: Simulation Epidemiology.

Background In a population, when a disease is causing a symptom, the overall symptom incidence can be determined by proportions diseased, baseline symptom incidence, and risk ratios of developing the symptom due to the disease. There are various measures of association, including risk ratios. How risk ratios are linked to other measures of association, such as correlation coefficients and chi-squared statistics, has not been explicitly discussed.

The Upper Limits of Risk Ratios and Recommendations for Reporting Risk Ratios, Odds Ratios, and Rate Ratios.

Background Relative measures, including risk ratios (RRs) and odds ratios (ORs), are reported in many epidemiological studies. RRs represent how many times a condition is likely to develop when exposed to a risk factor. The upper limit of RRs is the multiplicative inverse of the baseline incidence.

Critical Hierarchical Appraisal and Reporting Tool for Composite Measures (CHAOS).

Background Composite measures are often used to represent certain concepts that cannot be measured with single variables and can be used as diagnoses, prognostic factors, or outcomes in clinical or health research. For example, frailty is a diagnosis confirmed based on the number of age-related symptoms and has been used to predict major health outcomes. However, undeclared assumptions and problems are prevalent among composite measures.

Why Mental Illness Diagnoses Are Wrong: A Pilot Study on the Perspectives of the Public.

Background: Mental illness diagnostic criteria are made based on assumptions. This pilot study aims to assess the public's perspectives on mental illness diagnoses and these assumptions.

Methods: An anonymous survey with 30 questions was made available online in 2021.

Interpretable Trials: Is Interpretability a Reason Why Clinical Trials Fail?

There are clinical trials using composite measures, indices, or scales as proxy for independent variables or outcomes. Interpretability of derived measures may not be satisfying. Adopting indices of poor interpretability in clinical trials may lead to trial failure.

Simulation study to demonstrate biases created by diagnostic criteria of mental illnesses: major depressive episodes, dysthymia, and manic episodes.

Objectives: Composite diagnostic criteria alone are likely to create and introduce biases into diagnoses that subsequently have poor relationships with input symptoms. This study aims to understand the relationships between the diagnoses and the input symptoms, as well as the magnitudes of biases created by diagnostic criteria and introduced into the diagnoses of mental illnesses with large disease burdens (major depressive episodes, dysthymic disorder, and manic episodes).

Settings: General psychiatric care.

Opportunities and Challenges From Leading Trends in a Biomonitoring Project: Canadian Health Measures Survey 2007-2017.

Biomonitoring can be conducted by assessing the levels of chemicals in human bodies and their surroundings, for example, as was done in the Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS). This study aims to report the leading increasing or decreasing biomarker trends and determine their significance. We implemented a trend analysis for all variables from CHMS biomonitoring data cycles 1-5 conducted between 2007 and 2017.

Using syndrome mining with the Health and Retirement Study to identify the deadliest and least deadly frailty syndromes.

Syndromes are defined with signs or symptoms that occur together and represent conditions. We use a data-driven approach to identify the deadliest and most death-averse frailty syndromes based on frailty symptoms. A list of 72 frailty symptoms was retrieved based on three frailty indices.

Composite diagnostic criteria are problematic for linking potentially distinct populations: the case of frailty.

Composite diagnostic criteria are common in frailty research. We worry distinct populations may be linked to each other due to complicated criteria. We aim to investigate whether distinct populations might be considered similar based on frailty diagnostic criteria.