Prospective study

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Categories of patient-oriented studies

A prospective study (Latin prospectivus : foresighted) serves, for example, to test a hypothesis about the effectiveness of a treatment method. It is determined in advance which hypothesis is to be tested, and the data is collected specifically for this purpose - in contrast to the retrospective evaluation of already existing data.

The prospectiveness of a study says something about the timing of the creation of hypotheses and data collection. The data in such a study are collected specifically for testing the hypothesis after the hypothesis has been drawn up. One advantage is that the data material can then be tailored precisely to the requirements of the study.

In a retrospective study, however, one can e.g. For example, after setting up the hypothesis, search existing databases and extract data from them - these may then not exactly match the requirements of the study, on the other hand this procedure is often less costly and time-consuming.

Prospective studies can be divided into experimental prospective studies and observational prospective studies. In the experimental study, the strength of the independent variable and its assignment to the individual test subjects is usually carried out by the examiner by means of randomization . Such an allocation does not take place in the observational study.

example

If one wants to study the effect of smoking on the development of lung cancer, there are two prospective approaches:

  1. Prospectively observing: the test persons are asked how much they smoke, they are classified into groups accordingly and examined whether they develop lung cancer at different rates.
  2. prospective experimental: You take a group of test persons, divide them into subgroups by randomization and tell each group how many cigarettes they should smoke per day, and then examine the relationship.

As you can see, the second solution is not always ethically justifiable, although theoretically it achieves the safer results, because it e.g. B. prevents that there is a third variable that affects both the independent variable and the dependent variable .

See also

literature

  • Richard Doll : Cohort studies: history of the method. I. Prospective cohort studies. In: Social and preventive medicine. Volume 46, Number 2, 2001, pp. 75-86, doi : 10.1007 / BF01299724 .
  • Gaus, Wilhelm; Muche, Rainer: Medical Statistics. Applied biometrics for doctors and health professions , 2nd, revised edition, Schattauer Verlag, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-7945-3241-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ CM Seiler: Patient-Oriented Research in Surgery . In: Manfred Georg Krukemeyer, Hans-Ullrich Spiegel (Hrsg.): Surgical research . Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 978-3-13-133661-3 , p. 205–212 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  2. ↑ Duden vol. 5. The foreign dictionary. 1997. p. 665