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Open AccessJournal Article

The environment and disease: association or causation?

Hill Ab
- 01 Oct 2005 - 
- Vol. 83, Iss: 10, pp 796-798
TLDR
This paper contrasts Bradford Hill’s approach with a currently fashionable framework for reasoning about statistical associations – the Common Task Framework – and suggests why following Bradford Hill, 50+ years on, is still extraordinarily reasonable.
Abstract
In 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill offered his thoughts on: “What aspects of [an] association should we especially consider before deciding that the most likely interpretation of it is causation?” He proposed nine means for reasoning about the association, which he named as: strength, consistency, specificity, temporality, biological gradient, plausibility, coherence, experiment, and analogy. In this paper, we look at what motivated Bradford Hill to propose we focus on these nine features. We contrast Bradford Hill’s approach with a currently fashionable framework for reasoning about statistical associations – the Common Task Framework. And then suggest why following Bradford Hill, 50+ years on, is still extraordinarily reasonable.

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