Low body weight [ 10] and weight loss, particularly if involuntary, are major markers of harmful under-nutrition in older people [ 9, 11].
Our results imply that lower eGFR and higher serum β2MG in the late posttransplant period are surrogate markers of harmful effects on kidney allograft.
Health behaviours among doctors has been suggested to be an important marker of how harmful lifestyle behaviours are perceived.
Smoking in adolescents may also be a marker of other harmful lifestyles such as engagement in illicit drug use, alcohol use, psychiatric illnesses and sexual intercourse [ 4- 6].
Health behaviours among doctors have been suggested to be an important marker of how harmful lifestyle behaviours are perceived in a country [ 1].
In any case, any source-specific PM2.5 in our study should be considered merely as a marker of a harmful factor in PM; causal factors are still to be identified.
Measurements of excreted heme precursors have the potential to serve as biological markers for harmful but preclinical effects of certain chemical exposures; this potential warrants further research and applied field studies.
The phenomenon has been demonstrated in an 80-year-old community based Japanese population by Takata et al. 14 It is unknown whether a low BMI is a marker of disease severity or is harmful as such.
Whether failure of discontinuation of RRT is just a marker of severity of disease or is harmful by itself remains questioned [38].
Biases exist at several levels: reporting of harmful versus non-harmful events and correct classification of categories of harm.
