Prospective cohort study
Encyclopedia
A prospective cohort study is a cohort study
Cohort study
A cohort study or panel study is a form of longitudinal study used in medicine, social science, actuarial science, and ecology. It is an analysis of risk factors and follows a group of people who do not have the disease, and uses correlations to determine the absolute risk of subject contraction...

 that follows over time a group of similar individuals (cohort
Cohort (statistics)
In statistics and demography, a cohort is a group of subjects who have shared a particular time together during a particular time span . Cohorts may be tracked over extended periods in a cohort study. The cohort can be modified by censoring, i.e...

s) who differ with respect to certain factors under study, to determine how these factors affect rates of a certain outcome
Outcome
Outcome may refer to:* Outcome , a concept in game theory* The Outcome, a Swedish punk rock band* outcome measure in a clinical trial...

. For example, one might follow a cohort of middle-aged truck drivers who vary in terms of smoking habits, to test the hypothesis that the 20-year incidence rate of lung cancer will be highest among heavy smokers, followed by moderate smokers, and then nonsmokers.

The prospective study is important for research on the etiology
Etiology
Etiology is the study of causation, or origination. The word is derived from the Greek , aitiologia, "giving a reason for" ....

 of diseases and disorders in humans because for ethical reasons people cannot be deliberately exposed to suspected risk factors in controlled experiments.

Prospective cohort studies are typically ranked higher in the hierarchy of evidence than retrospective cohort studies.

It can be more expensive than a case–control study.

One of the advantages of prospective cohort studies is they can help determine risk factors for being infected with a new disease because they are a longitudinal observation over time, and the collection of results is at regular time intervals, so recall error is minimized.
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