5 Attributable risk

A risk ratio says how strongly an exposure is associated with a disease; it does not say how much disease the exposure is responsible for. A tenfold risk from an exposure that almost nobody has accounts for few cases, while a doubling of risk from an exposure that half the population has may account for a third of them. The attributable measures answer the question a health authority asks: how much of the disease would be avoided if the exposure were removed? They have a causal reading only to the extent that the association is causal and unconfounded, and the formulas below assume this.

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