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Published in Filomena Pereira-Maxwell, Medical Statistics, 2018
The mechanism through which causal factors interact to cause disease. For every case of disease, there may be a single sufficient cause - the presence of a single risk factor - or, more likely, a combination of factors, or the presence of one or more risk factors combined with the absence of other factors. The different factors that make up a causal mechanism or sufficient cause are termed component causes. Different cases of the same disease may be caused by different mechanisms. For example, although cigarette smoke is a component cause in a significant proportion of lung cancer cases, lung cancer also occurs among nonsmokers, which suggests causal mechanisms not involving first-hand exposure are at work in these cases. Component causes that are involved in a large proportion of cases of a given disease are said to have a ‘strong effect’, as evidenced by the magnitude of measures of association (e.g. risk ratio, odds ratio). However, strength of association cannot be viewed separately from the actual prevalence of other component causes (Rothman et al., in ROTHMAN, GREENLAND & LASH (eds., 2012); ROTHMAN, 2012). For example, among groups with occupational exposures that cause lung cancer, the effect of cigarette smoke might be weaker than in the general population. See also cause-effect relationship, induction time, latency period.
Clinical entities, phenotypes, causation, and endotypes based on selected asthma publications
Published in Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, 2020
Gilbert Berdine, Robert Alexander, Kenneth Nugent
Rothman introduced the sufficient component cause model to explain complex chronic diseases.12 This model argues that often several components are necessary for the development of the disease and that these components do not need to be temporally associated. For example, an athlete with allergic asthma may develop symptoms only during seasons with high levels of allergens and significant training. Consequently, a cause is usually not a single component but rather a minimal set of conditions that inevitably produces the disease outcome. Each component in a sufficient cause is then called a component cause. A cause that is in every model is a necessary cause.