Required Reading:

1. Judd et al., Dietary Patterns Are Associated With Incident Stroke and Contribute to Excess Risk of Stroke in Black Americans

2. Nandi, Glymour, Kawachi, and VanderWeele. Using Marginal Structural Models to Estimate the Direct Effect of Adverse Childhood Social Conditions on Onset of Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Stroke. Epidemiology 2012. 

3. VanderWeele TJ. Mediation Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide. Annual Review of Public Health 2016.

Optional Reading:

Assignment:

Please identify a quantitative research article evaluating mediation in your field and provide the citation.

What is the primary discipline of the authors?

Draw a DAG representing the implicit or explicit causal model explored in this paper (you do not need to post your DAG, but we will try to discuss in class).

What is the exposure of interest?

What is the outcome of interest?

What is the hypothesized mediator of interest and how is it measured?

Describe the modeling approach and briefly report the estimated total, direct, and indirect effects (if these are reported). 

If the direct effect is reported, would you describe this as a natural direct effect, a controlled direct effect, or something else?

Do you think there is potential measurement error in the mediator and how would that affect the results?

Do you think there are unmeasured confounders of the mediator-outcome association and how would that affect the results of the mediation analysis?

Do you have any critiques of the paper?