Hi Laura,
hi Jean,
cointervention is a fairly common term in epidemiology, you might have come across it before. Wikipedia defines it as "Any additional intervention applied to members of either the study group or the control group in an RCT." Example: in an RCT of medication vs placebo for blood pressure control, the study doctor is aware of the group assignment and counsels the patients in the control group especially careful about diet changes and exercises.
Missclassification of the outcome means that the outcome is not correctly classified. Here, the outcome we are looking at is non-AAA related deaths and missclassification of same would be either an AAA-related death that is classified as non-AAA, or a non-AAA related death that is classified as AAA-related.
Sticky diagnosis bias and slippery linkage bias both refer to a consequence of screening:
1. the diagnosis derived from screening sticks with the patient and when he dies his death will be attributed to the previous diagnosis in any case although the true cause of death might just be completely unrelated. Applies to patients with positive screening test.
2. the screened patient dies on the follow-up problems of screening but because this is often a long connection of complication, nobody remembers that it started with the screening. and the death would be called non-disease related. Deaths due to screening are strictly speaking disease related even though the patient might not have been diagnosed with the disease as a result of screening.
Both situations could be called "miss-classification of the outcome".
Does that help?
Kerstin
