Table 2.

Unadjusted measures of relative association from three articles in the global health literature.

	Exposure	Outcome	Unexposed group outcome proportion	Risk Ratioa	Odds Ratiob	Magnitude of odds ratio relative to risk ratioc
1	Surviving Ebola virus [32]	Safe sexual behavior	14%	2.71	3.67	35%
2	Point-of-care testing [33]	Antibiotic use	78%	0.82	0.50	178%
3	Drinking [34]	Feelings of aggression	20%	3.1	6.7	116%

^a Risk ratio (for “exposed” vs. “unexposed”) computed directly from outcome proportions reported in the article as none of the three articles used the risk ratio as a measure of relative association.

^b Odds ratio is obtained from unadjusted logistic regression [32] or directly from outcome proportions reported [33,34].

^c In these examples where the outcome is relatively common (i.e., >10%), if the odds ratio were to be incorrectly interpreted as a risk ratio, this is the magnitude of overstatement of relative association.