A Modified Poisson Regression Approach to Prospective Studies with Binary Data

Relative risk is usually the parameter of interest in epidemiologic and medical studies.In this paper, the author proposes a modified Poisson regression approach (i.e., Poisson regression with a robust error variance) to estimate this effect measure directly.A simple 2-by-2 table is used to justify the validity of this approach.Results from a limited simulation study indicate that this approach is very reliable even with total sample sizes as small as 100.The method is illustrated with two data sets.clinical trials; cohort studies; logistic regression; Mantel-Haenszel; odds ratio; relative risk