Causale inferentie via regressiediscontinuïteit: lessen uit de gordelroosvaccinatie

A randomized controlled trial (RCT) remains the gold standard for establishing causal relationships in clinical medicine and health policy. As an experimental design, an RCT eliminates both measured and unmeasured confounding, allowing the observed differences in outcomes to be attributed to the intervention itself, rather than to other factors. However, an RCT is not always feasible, because of ethical, logistical, and financial constraints. In such cases, causal inference methods applied to observational data provide valuable alternatives for assessing causality, while also improving external validity by reflecting real-world clinical practice.