Copyright © 2005 by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS |
Invited Commentary: Barker Meets Simpson
From the Biostatistics Branch, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC.
Received for publication July 8, 2004; accepted for publication August 31, 2004.
Abbreviations: DAG, directed acyclic graph.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the current issue of the Journal, Tu et al. (1) show convincingly that if there is no correlation between birth weight and blood pressure but both are positively correlated with current weight (which they are), then adjustment for current weight can induce a negative correlation between birth weight and blood pressure. This demonstration may be important in stimulating epidemiologists to rethink recent evidence for the "fetal origins of adult disease" hypothesis. Articulated by Barker (2, 3), one fascinating example of such a phenomenon has been the negative relation between weight at birth and adult blood pressure, which is taken as evidence that prenatal events that impair fetal growth can set the course for susceptibility to chronic conditions in later life.
Tu et al. (1) remind us that models can lead us badly astray, even when trying to determine the direction of
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