Risk-adjusted Case-Control Study — Covariate-controlled Retrospective Design

A risk-adjusted case-control study is an observational design that identifies individuals with a disease outcome (cases) and comparable individuals without it (controls), then uses statistical adjustment — most commonly multivariable logistic regression — to estimate the association between an exposure and the outcome while controlling for confounding risk factors. The adjustment step is what distinguishes this variant from a simple case-control study, producing odds ratios that better reflect the independent contribution of the exposure of interest.