Epidemiologic research with administrative databases: red herrings, false alarms and pseudo-epidemics.

Abstract

In 1994, Altman (1994) startled themedical world by declaring that poor research is as unethical as fraudulent research. His reasoning was simple: both kinds of research mislead which, in turn, harms patients. A decade later, others (von Elm and Egger, 2004) found that the problem had persisted. With the growing indiscriminate use of administrative databases for epidemiologic research (Grimes, 2010) the problem has only gottenworse since then. The record-linkage studyof assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and cancer in this issue (Reigstad et al., 2015a) illustrates the problem.