Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 8, 2026

Murine Drinking Models in the Development of Pharmacotherapies for Alcoholism: Drinking in the Dark and Two-bottle Choice
Published on: January 7, 2019
Observational research on alcohol use and chronic disease outcome: new approaches to counter biases
Wenbin Liang1, Tanya Chikritzhs
1National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Perth, WA 6845, Australia. w.liang@curtin.edu.au
Background:
The frequently reported protective effects of moderate alcohol consumption in observational studies may be due to unadjusted bias.
Aim:
To examine two new approaches that account for unknown confounding factors and allow the application of intention-to-treat analysis.
Method:
This study used data from the 2008, 2009, and 2010 National Health Interview Surveys conducted in the United States. Unknown confounding effects were estimated through the association between parental alcohol use and health outcomes for children, because the presence of hypothetical physiological effects of alcohol can be ruled out for this association. In order to apply intention-to-treat analysis, previous alcohol use of former drinkers was obtained by using multiple imputations. Estimates with new adjustment approaches were compared with the traditional approach.
Results:
The traditional analytical approach; appears to be consistent with findings from previous observational studies; when two further adjustment approaches were used, the "protective" effects of moderate drinking almost disappeared.
Conclusion:
Use of a proxy outcome to estimate and control residual confounding effects of alcohol use and application of the intention-to-treat principle could provide a more realistic estimation of the true effects of alcohol use on health outcomes in observational epidemiological studies.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Bias in Epidemiological Studies
Observational Studies
There are three types of observational studies – Prospective, retrospective, and cross-sectional.
Prospective Study
Prospective studies, also known as longitudinal or cohort studies, are carried out by collecting future data from groups sharing similar characteristics. One example of...
Study Designs in Epidemiology
Observational studies are those where the researcher does not intervene but rather observes natural variations. They include cross-sectional, cohort, and case-control studies.
Strategies for Assessing and Addressing Confounding
Confounding can be addressed at both the design phase of a study and through analytical methods after data...
Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast, controlled...
Bias
In statistics, a sampling bias is created when a sample is collected from a population, and some members of the population are not as likely to be chosen as others (remember, each member...

