title: Invited commentary: Fewell and colleagues--fuel for debate.
abstract: Concern over the impact of flawed measurement continues to nag epidemiology. Early studies indicated that the impact of measurement error is benign, leading generally only to attenuation of associations; more recent research has documented that this impact, especially within the setting of multivariate modeling, cannot be expected always to be benign. It can, for example, be a source of unsettling inconsistency. Fewell and colleagues (Am J Epidemiol 2007;166:646-655) show that residual confounding is especially persistent in the presence of multivariate confounding.
authors.affiliation: Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY 14263, USA. james.marshall@roswellpark.org
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Marshall
mesh_terms: D015982:Bias; D015986:Confounding Factors, Epidemiologic; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D006801:Humans; D012107:Research Design