Published in:
Open Access
01-06-2019 | Zika Virus | COMMENTARY
The long and winding road to causality
Author:
Olaf M. Dekkers
Published in:
European Journal of Epidemiology
|
Issue 6/2019
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Excerpt
Epidemiologists face two fundamental and interrelated problems when judging causality: knowledge is fallible, and studies are imperfect. In medicine, this will always leave a degree of uncertainty in scientific judgements. From an epistemological point of view, even randomized trials cannot be regarded as the ultimate proof to establish a causal relation. Given this inherent uncertainty it is no surprise that much attention has been drawn to the question how we can move from an association to a valid judgement of causation. It was exactly this question that urged Austin Bradford Hill more than 50 years ago to his well-known and still worth-reading paper, in which his nine viewpoints (often referred to as Hill’s criteria) to judge causality were described [
1]. …