THE DESIGN AND INTERPRETATION OF CASE-CONTROL STUDIES OF

Abstract

Clarke, M. (Dept. of Community Health, U. of Leicester School of Medicine, P.O. Box 65, Leicester, LE2 7LX, England) and D. Clayton. The design and interpretation of case-control studies of perinatal mortality. Am J Epidemiol 1981; 113: 636-45. The difficulty of designing prospective studies of perinatal death makes the case-control study a method of choice. The particular problems associated with the identification of risk factors, the definition and enumeration of cases, and the selection of live birth controls in such a study, undertaken on all perinatal deaths occurring in a population of 850, 000 people during 1976–1978 are described. The method of control selection, chosen for reasons of feasibility, produced a nonrepresentatlve sample of controls. This was because controls were selected as the next live birth in the place of delivery where the perinatal death delivery occurred, which resulted In a sample stratified by place of delivery. Knowledge of the place of delivery of all births allowed a correction to be undertaken which was derived from the relative weights for the strata within which matching had occurred.