In a case-referent study, cases of disease are compared to noncases with respect to their antecedent exposure to a treatment in an effort to determine whether exposure causes some cases of the disease. Because exposure is not randomly assigned in the population, as it would be if the population...

In an observational study of treatment effects, subjects are not randomly assigned to treatment or control, so differing outcomes in treated and control groups may reflect a bias from nonrandom assignment rather than a treatment effect. After adjusting for measured pretreatment covariates,...