[Design and analysis of a study on etiologic factors in urological clinical research]

Abstract

The objective of etiologic research is to look for the causes of disease, their relationships with it, and their relative magnitude on the appearance of the disease. The observational studies (in which there is no manipulation of the study factor), that are performed when the knowledge about the disease to be studied allows to specify beforehand one or more hypothesis that can be tested are called etiologic or analytic studies. The objective of etiologic studies is to identify risk factors for a given disease, to estimate their effects on the appearance of disease, and also to suggest a possible strategy of interventions to diminish the appearance of disease. Case-control and cohort studies are the etiologic studies more often used, characteristics of which will be exposed in this article.