ABSTRACT
DAVID A. LANE University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
A patient takes a drug and subsequently experiences an adverse clinical event. Did the drug cause the event to happen? Answering this question is the goal of causality assessment. Causality assessment plays a role in clinical decision making, in the discovery of previously unsuspected adverse reactions to drugs, in pharmacoepidemiology, and in liability litigation. General discussions of causality assessment and its applications can be found in Venulet et al. (1982), Herman (1984), Jones and Herman (1986), Stephens (1985), and Lane (1987).
