Demonstrating causation in humans requires detection of a virus in the lungs prior to clinical manifestations of IPF (which is clinically implausible) or evidence that an anti-viral therapy confers anti-fibrotic effects.
Furthermore, the association strengthened after removing the first 2 years of follow-up, suggesting that detection bias or reverse causation is unlikely to explain our findings.
An interplay of a healthy cohort effect and reversed causation bias due to prodromal symptoms impedes detection of a possible association with dementia and Parkinson disease.
An effective incident reporting system facilitates early detection of factors related to causation and prevention of CIs in critical care areas.
Nevertheless, if there are any clinical samples for which pathogen detection alone is sufficient to assign causation, then these are lung and pleural aspirates.
With multiple specimens and multiple tests on those specimens, the volume of data collected by PERCH therefore presents analytic challenges in interpreting detection of multiple pathogens and distinguishing infection from causation.
Although each of the enteric viruses detected in this study is firmly established as a gastroenteritis pathogen, the detection of a virus in a child with AGE does not necessarily imply causation.
Combining proteomics, genomics, microarrays, nanotechnology, and mass spectrometry with traditional detection tools such as histopathology may better confirm or refute hypotheses of causation, but only when applied to appropriate specimens from well-designed epidemiologic studies in the appropriate populations (1 ).
While detection of AHV-5 in this horse with EMPF does not imply causation, its role as a pathogen in horses warrants further study, in particular as a co-factor with EHV-5 in the development of EMPF.
There is undoubtedly a very large range of disturbing effects, and causation is most of the time difficult to establish because time between cancer initiation and its detection is usually long.
