Pragmatic Nested Case-Control Study

A pragmatic nested case-control study embeds a case-control analysis within a pre-existing real-world cohort — typically drawn from electronic health records, administrative claims, or disease registries — to examine associations between exposures and outcomes under routine clinical conditions. Controls are sampled from the risk set (those still at risk at the time each case occurs), preserving temporal sequence while dramatically reducing data-collection costs compared with a full cohort analysis.