Sibling Comparison Designs: Addressing Confounding Bias with Inclusion of Measured Confounders.

ABSTRACT: Genetically informative research designs are becoming increasingly popular as a way to strengthen causal inference with their ability to control for genetic and shared environmental confounding. Co-twin control (CTC) models, a special case of these designs using twin samples, decompose the overall effect of exposure on outcome into a within- and between-twin-pair term. Ideally, the within-twin-pair term would serve as an estimate of the exposure effect controlling for genetic and shared environmental factors, but it is often confounded by factors not shared within a twin-pair. Previous simulation work has shown that if twins are less similar on an unmeasured confounder than they are on an exposure, the within-twin-pair estimate will be a biased estimate of the exposure effect, even more bi

SUBMITTER: Saunders GRB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7170177 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature