Question

You finally received funding to study the incidence of lung cancer development between smokers and non-smokers. (1) What study design would be the most appropriate for this study? (2) How would you justify the choice of design? and (3) What are the strengths and limitations of your chosen design?

Answer 1

1, case-control study design will be most appropriate for this study.
2, case-control study is a type of observational study between two groups (smoking and nonsmoking) that differ the outcome needed to be identified and compared. it helps to determine the exposure associated with the outcome (lung cancer). a case-control study is a retrospective that finds the outcome by investigating the exposure group.
3, the strength of this study, it is efficient for rare cases of diseases. lung cancer with long latency periods between exposure and disease identification. this study design is low cost and less time consuming, their data is hard to obtain and low-risk identification, this study includes a dynamic population. limitation of this study design it causes subject to selection bias, there will be rare exposure for lung cancer with signs and symptoms, it causes subject to observation bias. this study design does not allow calculation of incidence that causes absolute risk.