Description: Examining the principles and methods of research for the evaluation of factors affecting the outcome of disease, this volume emphasizes diagnostic and therapeutic interventions - the factors most readily modified by health care providers. The author discusses various ways of structuring observations on patient groups and appraises the nature and strength of inferences drawn from those observations. Weiss also demonstrates how the results of clinical epidemiologic research can be incorporated into the decision-making process utilized in clinical medicine. The Second Edition differs from the earlier one in a number of respects. Despite devoting less attention to decision analysis, this new edition is longer. It contains expanded sections on measuring the accuracy and efficacy of tests, and details new developments in the design of randomized and non-randomized studies of the consequences of treatment. The book's underlying thesis, however, remains the same: the resources available to health care are finite and, through properly conducted research, the most efficient and safest ways of using these resources can and should be identified.

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