Relative odds

A measure of the odds of an event happening in one group compared to the odds of the same event happening in another group. In cancer research, relative odds are most often used in case-control (backward looking) studies to find out if being exposed to a certain substance or other factor increases the risk of cancer. For example, researchers may study a group of individuals with cancer (cases) and another group without cancer (controls) to see how many people in each group were exposed to a certain substance or factor. They calculate the odds of exposure in both groups and then compare the odds. A relative odds of one means that both groups had the same odds of exposure and, therefore, the exposure probably does not increase the risk of cancer. A relative odds of greater than one means that the exposure may increase the risk of cancer, and a relative odds of less than one means that the exposure may reduce the risk of cancer. Also called odds ratio.

Explore Medical Terms

20000+ Medical & Health Terms for Doctors, students & patients from a medical dictionary. Our experts define difficult medical & health language in easy-to-understand explanations of each and every medical term.

Medical & Health Terms online medical dictionary provides quick & easy access to hard-to-spell and often misspelled medical & health definitions through an extensive alphabetical A-Z listing.