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The Problems of Etiologic Science and Epidemiologic Case-Control Research

Alvan R. Feinstein, MD; Ralph I. Horwitz, MD; Walter O. Spitzer, MD; Renaldo N. Battista, MD

JAMA. 1981;246(9):957-961.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

THE RECENT report that coffee may cause pancreatic cancer¹ was presented in a pattern that has become distressingly familiar. The alleged carcinogen is a commonly used product. The report was given widespread publicity before the supporting evidence was available for appraisal by the scientific community, and the public received renewed fear and uncertainty about the cancerous hazards lurking in everyday life.

The research on coffee and pancreatic cancer was done with the case-control technique that has regularly been used in epidemiologic circumstances where the more scientifically desirable forms² of clinical investigation—a randomized controlled trial or a suitably performed observational cohort study—are either impossible or unfeasible. In case-control studies, the investigators begin at the end, rather than at the beginning, of the cause-effect pathway. The cases are selected from persons in whom the target disease has already developed. The controls are selected from persons in whom that disease has not . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn (Drs Feinstein and Horwitz), and the Cooperative Studies Program Support Center, Veterans Administration Hospital, West Haven, Conn (Dr Feinstein), and the McGill Cancer Center, McGill University (Dr Spitzer), and the Kellogg Center for Advanced Studies in Primary Care, Montreal General Hospital (Drs Spitzer and Battista), Montreal.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Program, Yale University School of Medicine, 333 Cedar St, Box 3333, New Haven, CT 06510 (Dr Feinstein).

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