Question

A clinical trial is being done to find out if there is a link between breast cancer and diets that are high in fat. However, people who consume diets high in fat may also have other characteristics of their lifestyle that increase their risk for breast cancer. How can researchers overcome the problem of these confounding factors in a clinical trial?

1) Researchers can randomly assign participants to a treatment or control group
2) Researchers can use a retrospective study design to observe the characteristics of the diets of the people who have breast cancer and those who don't
3) Researchers can assign people to consume diets either high in fat or low in fat and then measure the outcomes

Answer 1

Researchers can mitigate the effects of confounding factors in a clinical trial by using random assignment, retrospective studies, or directly assigning specific diets, although ethical and practical considerations must be addressed.

Step-by-step explanation:

To overcome the problem of confounding factors in a clinical trial that investigates a potential link between breast cancer and high-fat diets, researchers can implement several strategies:

• Random assignment of participants to treatment or control groups is one method to help ensure that the groups are comparable across a variety of characteristics, reducing the influence of confounding variables.
• Retrospective studies, such as case-control studies, can provide insights by observing past behaviors and characteristics of individuals with and without breast cancer, though this method is less effective at establishing causality compared to randomized trials.
• Directly assigning diets high or low in fat and monitoring the subsequent outcomes can help to isolate the effects of dietary fat on breast cancer risk, though ethical and practical considerations must be taken into account.

By using such methods, researchers can attempt to reduce the impact of confounders and make more accurate determinations about the relationship between diet and breast cancer.