![]() This obviously rules out women in studies of prostate cancer incidence, but also needs care in infectious diseases studies, for example, where prior disease experience may confer immunity, determining an individual’s ‘at risk’ status at the beginning of follow-up. This definition of risk is sometimes referred to as cumulative risk since it counts all disease occurrences accumulating over the specified time period.Usually, at least in epidemiological studies, we focus on incident cases of a specified disease as the relevant outcome, thereby limiting the population at risk by requiring that individuals are both disease-free at the beginning of the time interval and at risk of becoming an incident case. Unpacking this definition requires careful thought and precise descriptions including (i) an accurate definition of what constitutes the occurrence of a disease, (ii) the delineation of an appropriate time scale and the window of time when disease is recorded, and (iii) the definition of the population at risk of disease development. ![]() DefinitionLoosely speaking, the risk of a disease is “the probability that an individual without disease will develop disease over a defined age or time interval”.
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