A case series (also known as a clinical series) is a medical research descriptive study that tracks patients with a known exposure given similar treatment or examines their medical records for exposure and outcome. It can be retrospective or prospective and usually involves a smaller number of patients than more powerful case-control studies or randomized controlled trials. Case series may be consecutive or non-consecutive, depending on whether all cases presenting to the reporting authors over a period were included, or only a selection.
Case series may be confounded by selection bias, which limits statements on the causality of correlations observed; for example, physicians who look at patients with a certain illness and a suspected linked exposure will have a selection bias in that they have drawn their patients from a narrow selection (namely their hospital or clinic).
Famous quotes containing the words case and/or series:
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)