Case-control vs. Retrospective Cohort ??? (Please help)

[Jumb0]

I am trying to write the IRB proposal for my summer research project right now, and I can't decide if it's a cohort or case-control study...

Basically, we are looking into the charts of people who had a certain disease in the past five years and seeing if their outcomes differed significantly based on whether they received Treatment X vs. Treatment Y.

We will be applying for waiver of the consent process due to the retrospective nature, if that makes a difference.

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[sloop]

This sounds like a cohort study. You're defining groups by characteristics (in this case treatment) and looking at outcomes, rather than defining groups by outcomes and looking at characteristics.

 

[ZX10R]

Retrospective cohort. In a case-control you have the controls and those already affected. Then you look back in time for a common "exposure" AKA risk factor. Since you have the outcomes before hand and are looking forward from point of "exposure" this is classically a retrospective cohort.

If you took a population of pts with a common disease with two different outcomes, then you looked back and discovered it was due to drug X/Y you'd be looking at the risk frequency of the two. But once again in your study you know the outcomes and the risk, you are merely looking at the incidence that drug X/Y led to common/different outcomes.