Question

In your medical practice, you have observed that iron deficiency anemia appears to develop in a higher proportion of women who follow a strict vegan diet. You decide to conduct a prospective cohort study.

A. Develop a hypothesis for your study

B. Identify the exposure (independent variable)

                

C. Identify the outcome (the dependent variable)

                

D. List at least 2 confounding variables

E. How will you account for these variables in your study?

Answer 1

A) Hypothesis can be framed as -

Null hypothesis : Strict vegan diet has no significant role in causing iron deficiency anemia

i.e, Relative Risk = 1

Alternative hypothesis: Strict vegan diet has significant role (or is risk factor) for iron deficiency anemia.

I.e, Relative Risk   1

B) Exposure is having strict vegan diet and non-exposure will be having both vegan and non-vegan diet.

C) Outcome is the iron deficiency Anaemia disease vaeed on this we will have two groups those who develop disease and those who doesn't develop disease.

D) Confounding variables are the extraneous variables that affect the outcome apart from the exposure under study. The effect of these variables should be eliminated otherwise it affect our result.

Age and Gender can be two confounding variable here as both affect iron deficiency. Women are at greater risk of Anaemia than men. Also, infants and children are also at higher risk of iron deficiency because they need extra ieon for growth.

E) These confounding variables can be accounted by collecting data on exposure and outcome separately for male and female and for different age groups (making different tables) and then, applying mantel - haenszel method for finding relative risk.