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Epistemology of causal inference in pharmacology

Towards a framework for the assessment of harms

  • Original Paper in Philosophy of Science
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Abstract

Philosophical discussions on causal inference in medicine are stuck in dyadic camps, each defending one kind of evidence or method rather than another as best support for causal hypotheses. Whereas Evidence Based Medicine advocates the use of Randomised Controlled Trials and systematic reviews of RCTs as gold standard, philosophers of science emphasise the importance of mechanisms and their distinctive informational contribution to causal inference and assessment. Some have suggested the adoption of a pluralistic approach to causal inference, and an inductive rather than hypothetico-deductive inferential paradigm. However, these proposals deliver no clear guidelines about how such plurality of evidence sources should jointly justify hypotheses of causal associations. We here develop such guidelines by first giving a philosophical analysis of the underpinnings of Hill’s (1965) viewpoints on causality. We then put forward an evidence-amalgamation framework adopting a Bayesian net approach to model causal inference in pharmacology for the assessment of harms. Our framework accommodates a number of intuitions already expressed in the literature concerning the EBM vs. pluralist debate on causal inference, evidence hierarchies, causal holism, relevance (external validity), and reliability.

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Notes

  1. 1 In reality, the decision problem is not as black and white as presented here. There are further actions available to a drug licensing agency such as: restricting access to the drug to a subset of patients and adding further information to the package insert, such as black-box warnings. For ease of exposition, we shall here disregard further possible actions and only consider the black and white decision problem on whether or not to approve a drug or leave it in the market after its safety profile has changed.

  2. 2 We deliberately use the circled Ⓒ as our relational predicate symbol here to not invoke any specific technical, theory-informed reading of this claim, yet. We precisely do think, though, that such an explication is in order – even more so since it is often neglected and rarely undertaken in the methodological literature.

  3. 3 This is the standard justification of inductive inference (Carnap 1947; Howson and Urbach 2006); we do not enter into the related philosophical debate here. However, nothing hinges on the particular philosophical position about truth.

  4. 4Ioannidis (2016) examines the empirical evidence in support of Bradford Hill guidelines and de-emphasise their importance. Indeed the influence of biases of various kinds may distort the genuine informative value of such indicators. In our framework, this aspect is explicitly taken into account by providing separate lines of support for the confirmatory value of a given piece of evidence and its reliability.

  5. 5 Drawing causal inferences from functional or statistical relations alone is a hard task and in many cases not feasible. If a functional description (like a structural equation) or a statistical connection (like a high measure of covariance) is available though (and has proven stable), it can be used for intervention and prediction – two hallmarks of causal knowledge. Although David Freedman criticises the Spirtes-Glymour-Scheines approach (Spirtes et al. 2000) towards automatically inferring causal claims from raw data, he points precisely to the practical use of formal dose-response relations when he writes that “[t]hree possible uses for regression equations are (i) to summarise data, or (ii) to predict values of the dependent variable, or (iii) to predict the results of interventions” (Freedman 1997, p. 62).

  6. 6 This has implications for both causal inference as well as intervention and prediction: the more complex the functional relationship, the more difficult it is to detect it and to accurately represent it; and therefore the higher the risk of false prediction and inadequate intervention (Steel 2008). However, the framework presented here focuses on detecting causes rather than on using causal knowledge for prediction and intervention.

  7. 7Woodward (2010) uses specificity to distinguish between different kinds of causes, thereby leaving room for ontological pluralism, and also allows for specificity (as well as stability) to come in degrees.

  8. 8 Since specificity-as-bijection (referring to a property of the investigated nexus between cause and effect) supports the causal hypothesis DⒸH by excluding alternative explanations of the observed effect (and ideally also alternative effects of the tested drug), we propose to model these alternatives on the same categorical level as our main hypothesis, with the same methodological arsenal for testing and confirming (or rejecting) them. It is the confirmation of D ′ⒸH ′ together with the rejection of D ′ⒸH and DⒸH ′ that makes our actual hypothesis a specific relation, thereby lending additional confirmatory support to it.

  9. 9 Precedence in time is considered so essential to causes that Russel bases his denial of their existence on the temporal symmetry of laws in physics, (Russell 1912).

  10. 10 From a more general perspective this precisely touches upon the difficulty of defining or describing an event, as discussed, e.g., by David Lewis in “Counterfactual Dependence and Time’s Arrow” (1979) and “Events” (1986).

  11. 11 The role of evidence about mechanisms of chemical substances in risk assessment has been recently analysed by Luján et al. (2016). Two issues are particularly relevant for the present purposes: 1) the questioned applicability of animal data in humans; 2) the lack of guarantee that similarity of modes of action may warrant extrapolation of phenotypic effects from one chemical to another. Both issues relate to the problem of extrapolation: the former regard whether a given chemical will produce the same effect in the study and in the target population; the latter refers to whether similar chemicals produce similar effects (on a given population). In our framework the problem of extrapolation is addressed with the following in mind: I. As explained in Section 2.3, in the case of risk assessment the main concern relates to false negatives; hence any signal should be accounted for as a possible sign unveiling latent risks – “If it happened there, it can also happen here”; II. Warrant for extrapolation is also taken to come in degrees and therefore is incorporated in a probabilistic approach. This lets the degree of confidence in such warrant guide the decision at hand in combination with other relevant dimensions (as illustrated in Section 2.2).

  12. 12 Randomisation has putatively two main roles: 1) in the long run, it should allow the investigator to approach the true mean difference between treatment and control group; however it is unclear what this true underlying population probability denotes when we are dealing not with population of molecules for instance, but with population of patients undergoing medical interventions, where heterogeneity among individuals can at most allow for an aggregate average measure. Furthermore, it is obviously unethical and unfeasible to re-sample the same subjects of an experiment again and again, and even if this were possible, the subjects who were administered the drug in the first round would undergo physiological change; consequently, the successive trial population would no longer be the “same” (Worrall 2007a); 2) randomisation (together with intervention and blinding) should guarantee the internal validity of the study by severing any common cause, or common effect, between the investigated treatment and its putative effects (i.e., avoidance of confounders and (self-) selection bias). This kind of objective is supposed to justify the primary role assigned to randomised evidence by so called evidence hierarchies, see Section 6 below.

  13. 13 This is also known as the “potential outcome approach” to causal inference.

  14. 14 David Lewis’ bases his formal account of causation implicitly on the concept of comparative similarity and concedes the following: “We do make judgments of comparative overall similarity – of people, for instance – by balancing off many respects of similarity and difference. Often our mutual expectations about the weighting factors are definite and accurate enough to permit communication. […] But the vagueness of over-all similarity will not be entirely resolved. Nor should it be. The vagueness of similarity does infect causation, and no correct analysis can deny it.” (cf. Lewis 1973, pp. 559–560)

  15. 15 One particular inference by analogy is that from animal studies/models to a human target population. In LaFollette and Shanks (1995), it has been argued that animal studies are only good for hypothesis discovery. We side with Baetu (2016) in thinking that animal studies are one important piece to the puzzle to predicting drug reactions.

  16. 16 The reader is referred to the very recent (Crupi and Tentori 2014) which discusses two leading Bayesian confirmation measures in detail.

  17. 17 ¬R e p i means that “not consequence i is reported” rather than “consequence i is not reported”.

  18. 18 Where R E L i and C O N i denote the parent variables of R E P i .

  19. 19 Superscripts are suppressed in the notation, whenever no confusion arises.

  20. 20 Case reports may contribute in two main different ways to harm assessment: 1) the first one(s) contribute to hypothesis generation: they function as alarm signals by identifying identify a previously unknown side effect; 2) following these hypothesis generation events, the subsequent case reports contribute to “strengthen” the signals, i.e., they have a confirmatory role, analogously to compared studies and other statistical evidence as illustrated in this paper. Other kinds of studies may also function as generators of hypotheses of course, but this role is mainly covered by case reports.

  21. 21 By ‘observational/static’ we refer to inference from observation alone, whereas by ‘interventional/dynamic’ we refer to inference from data collected in interaction with the investigated system or population. For example, this contrast becomes evident in the difference between standard probabilistic conditioning (which amounts to shifting the focus in a probabilistic model) and conditioning with Pearl’s d o-operator (which amounts to transforming the probabilistic model).

  22. 22 The latter case makes the conceptual divide even more obvious: If one knows the hypothesis to be true, learning that there is no difference-making would not change one’s belief in a positive dose-response. In this case the causal relation under investigation would then be explained as holistic causation. We are thankful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this case out to us.

  23. 23 We are thankful to an anonymous reviewer for hinting at sources of potential disagreement about the role of mechanistic knowledge and thus helping us elucidate our point here. For a discussion of different network structures and their use for hypothesis confirmation see, e.g., Wheeler and Scheines (2013).

  24. 24 Elicitations of parts of priors from experts in a medical context has recently been reviewed in Johnson et al. (2010). Determination of prior distributions combining expert opinion with historical data is reported in Hampson et al. (2014, Section 4).

  25. 25 This directly derives from the potential outcome approach underpinning RCT methodology. See Holland (1986), Rubin (2011), and Vandenbroucke et al. (2016) for a critical appraisal of this approach.

  26. 26 The rationale for this ranking is provided by methodological-foundational considerations mainly developed within standard statistics and follow a kind of hypothetico-deductive approach to scientific inference (see also our comments on Experiment above, Page 19).

  27. 27 A somewhat unwanted consequence of this “take the best” approach is that it has become commonplace to assume an uncommitted attitude towards observed associations least they are “proved” by gold standard evidence (see the still ongoing debate on the possible causal association between paracetamol and asthma; (Shaheen et al. 2000; Eneli et al. 2005; Shaheen et al. 2008; Henderson and Shaheen 2013; Allmers et al. 2009; McBride 2011; Heintze and Petersen 2013; Martinez-Gimeno and García-Marcos 2013)).

  28. 28 This also complies with the precautionary principle in risk assessment and with how decisions should be made in health settings (see Section 2.2).

  29. 29 This also responds to concerns expressed in Cartwright (2007b), Mumford S. and Anjum (2011), Anjum and Mumford (2012), and Kerry et al. (2012).

  30. 30 Both the Kentians and Cartwright construe the term “mechanism” in slightly different fashion than we did here. For them, a mechanism need not be described on the (sub-)molecular level. This detail is not relevant for our current discussion.

  31. 31Osimani and Landes (Forthcoming) investigates the various concepts of reliability involved in such considerations.

  32. 32 Moreover, our approach addresses explicitly the issue of external validity by formally incorporating reasoning by analogy (see Section 3.2.6).

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Acknowledgments

This paper was presented at various workshops and conferences in Munich, New Brunswick, Sheffield, Helsinki, Durham, Amsterdam, and Ferrara. We greatly profited from the comments and suggestions made by the audiences; in particular we wish to thank Rani Lill Anjum, Timo Bolt, Giovanni Boniolo, Branden Fitelson, Bennett Holman, Phyllis Illari, Mike Kelly, Ulrich Mansmann, Carlo Martini, Julian Reiss, Stephen Senn, Beth Shaw, Jacob Stegenga, and Veronica Vieland. We also thank the focus group members of the ERC project “Philosophy of Pharmacology: Safety, Statistical Standards, and Evidence Amalgamation”, to whom we owe a considerable improvement of the paper’s argumentation: Jeffrey Aronson, Lorenzo Casini, Brendan Clarke, Vincenzo Crupi, Sebastian Lutz, Federica Russo, Glenn Shafer, Jan Sprenger, David Teira, and Jon Williamson. We are extremely grateful to our colleagues at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, who helped us clarify the objectives and scope of our research, and suggested possible paths of development; in particular we wish to thank Seamus Bradley, Richard Dawid, Samuel C. Fletcher, Stephan Hartmann, Alexander Reutlinger, and Gregory Wheeler. Finally, we thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments. These significantly helped us refine some important assumptions in our theoretical framework. Of course any inaccuracies or errors in the text are, however, our own responsibility.

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  1. Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Jürgen Landes, Barbara Osimani & Roland Poellinger

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  1. Jürgen Landes
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Correspondence to Barbara Osimani.

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This work is supported by the European Research Council (grant 639276) and the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP).

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Landes, J., Osimani, B. & Poellinger, R. Epistemology of causal inference in pharmacology. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 8, 3–49 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-017-0169-1

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