Editing Cohort study (section)

{{Short description|Form of longitudinal study}}
{{for multi|analysis of cohorts in community health and business data sets|Cohort analysis|other uses|Cohort (disambiguation)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=March 2020}}
A '''cohort study''' is a particular form of [[longitudinal study]] that samples a [[Cohort (statistics)|cohort]] (a group of people who share a defining characteristic, typically those who experienced a common event in a selected period, such as birth or graduation), performing a [[Cross-sectional data|cross-section]] at intervals through time. It is a type of [[panel study]] where the individuals in the panel share a common characteristic.

Cohort studies represent one of the fundamental designs of [[epidemiology]] which are used in research in the fields of [[medicine]], [[pharmacy]], [[nursing]], [[Psychological research|psychology]], [[social science]], and in any field reliant on 'difficult to reach' answers that are based on evidence ([[statistics]]). In medicine for instance, while clinical trials are used primarily for assessing the safety of newly developed pharmaceuticals before they are approved for sale, epidemiological analysis on how risk factors affect the incidence of diseases is often used to identify the causes of diseases in the first place, and to help provide pre-clinical justification for the plausibility of protective factors (treatments).