by Dr. Mark Irwin, Department of Statistics, The
Ohio State University
Let's consider data collected as part of a one-in-six survey of the electoral roll carried out in Whickham, United Kingdom, during 1972-74 and a follow-up study conducted 20 years later. While the original study was mainly concerned with thyroid disease and heart disease, we will look at something different. Instead, we will use the data from these two studies to examine the relationship between smoking and 20-year survival rates (Am. Stat., vol. 50, pp. 340-1). For simplicity, we will restrict ourselves to the 587 women aged 45 to 74 at the start of the study who were either current smokers or had never smoked. The 20-year survival information was determined for all of the women in the study.
The survival information broken down by smoking
status is shown
in Table 1. The data suggest that smoking might be beneficial as 43%
of
the nonsmokers died versus only 38% of the smokers. Could this
surprising
result be a correct interpretation of the data? No, it can't, as
Table 2 illustrates.
The analysis presented in Table 1 ignores the important confounding
variable strongly related to smoking and survival, the womens' ages at
the
start of the study. When survival rates are determined for women in
each of
the 10 year age ranges (45-54, 55-64, 65-74), the nonsmoking group
does
better in each case. In this example, few of the older women were
smokers
but most of them had died at the time of follow-up 20 years later.
When age
is ignored, as in the first table, the death rates are more of a
reflection that
the smokers tended to be younger and the nonsmokers tended to be
older, not
the effects of smoking.
This data set illustrates what has come to be known as Simpson's paradox, a reversal of the direction of a comparison or an association when data from several groups are combined to form a single group. Another example where missing an important confounding factor leads to an incorrect conclusion involves early observational studies examining the use of ultrasound and the frequency of low birth weight babies. Babies examined in the womb by ultrasound tended to have lower birth weights on average than those that weren't examined. However in this case, the confounding factor of problem pregnancies was ignored. The babies that were more likely to be examined by ultrasound tended to have problems that would also lead to lower birth weights. Later, randomized controlled clinical trials showed that ultrasound didn't have an adverse effect on birth weight and that, if anything, it tended to have a positive effect.
Confounding factors and Simpson's paradox provide
just one example of
difficulties that need to be considered as part of analyzing data. If
you would
like assistance from the Biostatistics Program in the design of your
study or the
analysis of your data, please feel to contact us.
Send us your
comments!