OHDSI Center Events

CBER BEST Seminar Series: Addressing Selection and Confounding Bias in Test-Negative Study Designs for Flu and COVID-19 Monitoring

Anyone can register and join for free.

Topic

Addressing Selection and Confounding Bias in Test-Negative Study Designs for Flu and COVID-19 Monitoring

Speaker

Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen
Luddy Family President’s Distinguished Professor, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Description

The test-negative design (TND) has become a standard approach to evaluate vaccine effectiveness against the risk of acquiring infectious diseases such as Influenza, Rotavirus, Dengue fever and, more recently, COVID-19 in real-world settings. Despite the TND’s potential to reduce unobserved differences in healthcare-seeking behavior (HSB) between vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects, substantial variability in unobserved HSB may remain among study participants. As latent HSB is likely also a strong predictor of selection into the TND sample, confounding bias of the vaccine’s causal effect by latent HSB may be induced by collider stratification bias resulting from the TND.