Hi DCR -
Week 5 in DCR is all about causal inference, confounding, and clinical trials. The recorded lecture is another very good one by Deborah Grady that tells the story of estrogen and heart disease, describing classic studies including the Nurse's Health Study, the HERS trial (led by Deborah and Steve Hulley here at UCSF), and the Women's Health Initiative. The material (particularly confounding) is conceptually challenging, and very important.
The 9a-10a session on Tuesday will be our last full-class discussion session. We've heard your desire for a more structured session that addresses the week's content more systematically. Warren Browner, a brilliant epidemiologist who left UCSF and became the CEO of California Pacific Medical Center, will be our discussant this week. I will lead Warren through a discussion that addresses some of the main topics of the course, and we'll use Warren's SPI (Study of Perioperative Ischemia) as a case study and starting point for the discussion. I've posted the 1990 NEJM article describing SPI on the syllabus under Materials, and encourage you to take a look at it before class in preparation for the discussion.
Hope your studies are shaping up! Look at the Final Project description and template for the 5-page protocol on the Syllabus and start filling in the sections with your previous homework, and feel free to bring up questions in your small groups.
See you on Tuesday.