Should 'Disability Status' be a covariate in most epidemiologic research?

摘要

This issue of the Annals of Epidemiology includes four articles addressing the topic of disability status, that is, the presence or absence of one or more physical, psychological, or developmental disabilities. Three of the papers stem from presentations at the Disability Symposium referenced above. The symposium was sponsored by the American College of Epidemiology and held at the 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology in Montreal in 2011. Rather than viewing the presence or absence of disabilities as a health outcome, the symposium considered disability status as a covariate in descriptive and etiologic epidemiologic studies.The first article begins by presenting the range of concepts and definitions of disabilities and then describes approaches used to measure a person's disability status [1]. Considering associations between exposures and injuries, the second article contrasts the influence of disabilities with the influence of demographic variables that are commonly analyzed as confounders or effect modifiers [2].