A Small Sample Correction for Estimating Attributable Risk in Case-Control Studies

The attributable risk, often called the population attributable risk, is in many epidemiological contexts a more relevant measure of exposure-disease association than the excess risk, relative risk, or odds ratio. When estimating attributable risk with case-control data and a rare disease, we present a simple bias correction to the standard approach, which also makes it more stable and less variable. As with analogous corrections given by Jewell (1986) for other measures of association, the adjustment often won't make a substantial difference unless the sample size is very small or point estimates are desired within fine strata, but we discuss the possible utility for applications.