Thus, this study can provide only first approximations of risks and tell only a little about causality.
In our skewed data the odds ratio of this variable cannot not be taken as an approximation of risk (see later).
Of course, this crude approximation of risk ignores many biological details, especially density dependent effects (described above), the fact that local adaptation and fitness are a function of many traits, and that analyses of multivariate traits may provide more realistic predictions.
This method used the most computationally intensive method for calculating mean hazard ratios (approximations of relative risk) entering each variable into the model and removing those that were no longer significant after adjustment for all other variables.
ORs and SMRs can be interpreted as reasonable approximations of the risk ratio when the disease is rare, and these measures have been pooled with risk ratios for meta-analyses before (McElvenny et al. 2004).
Because the prevalence of metabolic risk factors was high (>20% for most factors), ORs are likely to inflate approximations of relative risk (30).
With model based predictions serving as approximations of disease risk, these efforts will improve the efficacy of public health interventions for anthrax prevention and control.
For rare diseases, the odds ratio is a good approximation of relative risk; however for common diseases, the odds ratio could result in a misleading estimate of risk, where the odds ratios may be quite high even when the increase in risk is minor.
On the other hand, our study was limited by the rough approximations of the two risk factors (genetic risk and education level).
Moreover, the hazard difference is only a valid approximation of the risk difference if event rates are low, for instance less than 5% [ 16, 18].
