Figure 1From: Lifestyle variables and the risk of myocardial infarction in the General Practice Research DatabaseDirected Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) showing the difference between a) a confounding variable and b) a variable on the causal pathway. Here the example of body mass index (BMI) (exposure), acute myocardial infarction (AMI) (outcome) and diabetes (covariate) is used. The statistical approaches in this paper assume case b) for the comorbid conditions listed in table 1.Back to article page