Healthy user bias
The healthy user bias is a bias that can damage the validity of epidemiologic studies testing the efficacy of particular therapies or interventions. Specifically, it is a sampling bias: the kind of subjects that voluntarily enroll in a clinical trial and actually follow the experimental regimen are not representative of the general population. They can be expected, on average, to be healthier as they are concerned for their health and are predisposed to follow medical advice, both factors that would aid one's health. In a sense, being healthy or active about one's health is a precondition for becoming a subject of the study, an effect that can appear under other conditions such as studying particular groups of workers (i.e. someone in ill health is unlikely to have a job as manual laborer).
Further reading
- Li, C. -Y.; Sung, F. -C. (1999). "A review of the healthy worker effect in occupational epidemiology". Occupational Medicine. 49 (4): 225–9. doi:10.1093/occmed/49.4.225. PMID 10474913.
- Fornalski, K. W.; Dobrzyński, L. (2010). "The Healthy Worker Effect and Nuclear Industry Workers". Dose-Response. 8 (2): 125–147. doi:10.2203/dose-response.09-019.Fornalski.
- Tabuchi, T., Nakayama, T., Fukushima, W., Matsunaga, I., Ohfuji, S., Kondo, K., ... & Oshima, A. (2015). Determinants of participation in prostate cancer screening: A simple analytical framework to account for healthy‐user bias. Cancer science, 106(1), 108-114.