Nested Case-Control Study

A nested case-control study is an efficient observational design embedded within a defined cohort. For each participant who develops the outcome of interest (a case), a small number of matched controls are sampled from those still at risk at the same point in time. This density-sampling strategy yields odds ratios that approximate incidence-rate ratios from the full cohort at a fraction of the data-collection cost — making it the preferred alternative when measuring exposures for all cohort members would be prohibitively expensive or technically demanding.