Epic Potsdam Study Strengths And Weaknesses

The present investigation has its strengths and limitations both in study design and methods. An obvious strength in the study design is that all the studies were conducted within the well-characterised EPIC-Potsdam study. This study population accurately reflect the general population from which it is drawn. This indicates that our study population provides an appropriate platform to obtain data from individuals that have varying number of teeth (including complete edentate), different saliva bacterial profiles, inflammatory marker, and autoantibody levels as well as chronic disease risk that is not subject to selection bias. This study population also has rich exposure-related information. Another advantage is the minimal bias because the

All participants were examined with the same methods of data collection, blood and saliva collection and sampling. The next-generation sequencing approach to detect and quantify all bacteria in the saliva is quite advantageous. This provides a rich data to model the complex interaction of the oral bacterial community. Furthermore, appropriate statistical tests were used in all studies. In the statistical analyses of exposure-outcome associations, reverse causality was checked when it could be a possible explanation for the observed associations. Additionally, we appropriately identified adjustment covariates by causal graphs of the DAGs. This helps to understand the relationships between the variables in each study and also help control for bias of effect estimates. Moreover, this investigation is the first time the novel treelet transform statistical approach will be applied to oral bacteria data. The important strengths of this method in investigation of high-dimensional data, particularly in terms of interpretability of the generated components, stability of components and application in further analyses [108] is