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IJE Advance Access originally published online on September 22, 2009
International Journal of Epidemiology 2009 38(5):1199-1201; doi:10.1093/ije/dyp299
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.

Commentary: Cornfield, Epidemiology and Causality

Joel B Greenhouse

Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. E-mail: joel@stat.cmu.edu

Accepted 3 August 2009

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Throughout the 1950s, attacks on the accumulating evidence for a causal link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer frequently centred on the role of confounding variables that might explain the apparent association between the putative agent, cigarette smoke, and lung cancer. Because of the lack of control for omitted variables, there was a strong belief by many in the scientific community that evidence from observational studies was of less value than evidence generated by experiments. In two classic, but now mostly forgotten papers, Jerome Cornfield1,2 responded to these attacks ‘by providing a concise, explicit and lucid philosophic basis for the validity of information obtained from non-experimental studies’.3 Cornfield wrote:

We all have a vague feeling that if we can make an event occur, we understand it better than if we simply observe it passively. On analysis, this feeling seems to reduce to two propositions . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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Related articles in Int. J. Epidemiol.:

Commentary: Smoking and lung cancer: reflections on a pioneering paper
David R Cox
Int. J. Epidemiol. 2009 38: 1192-1193. [Extract] [Full Text]  

Commentary: Cornfield on cigarette smoking and lung cancer and how to assess causality
Marcel Zwahlen
Int. J. Epidemiol. 2009 38: 1197-1198. [Extract] [Full Text]  



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Smoking and lung cancer: causality, Cornfield and an early observational meta-analysis
Int. J. Epidemiol., October 1, 2009; 38(5): 1169 - 1171.
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