Bradford Hill (Austin)

Austin Bradford Hill was a British epidemiologist who developed a set of criteria in the 1960s to help determine if a link between a cause (like smoking) and an effect (like lung cancer) is likely to be causal. These criteria include factors such as strength of the association, consistency across studies, specificity, temporal relationship (cause before effect), biological gradient (dose-response), plausibility, coherence with existing knowledge, experiment, and analogy. While not strict rules, these guidelines help scientists evaluate whether an observed relationship is likely to be causal rather than just coincidental.