What can ecology learn from clinical medicine?

Our Forum article on how medical surrogate approaches could be applied to ecology is the result of research being done by the surrogate ecology group at The Australian National University (comprised of the paper’s authors). While discussing how to make a new and different contribution to this massive field, we found out that surrogates have been used extensively in clinical medicine for some time.

For example, blood pressure can be used as a surrogate for stroke risk, and smoking as a surrogate for lung cancer risk. The application of evidence-based ideas to the use of surrogate outcomes in medicine was underway by the late 1990s, and methods and processes were developed to ensure that the adoption of surrogates was made on the basis of solid reasoning. Key among these was the use of causal frameworks that link treatments to outcomes via the surrogate variable. This simple yet powerful idea forms the core of our paper, and provides an effective conceptual model to begin the extensive testing and evaluation of surrogate variables necessary for proper understanding of their behaviour and reliable use.

Philip Barton