We thank Benmarhnia and Rudolph¹ for their critical appraisal of our recent article on the use of controls in interrupted time series (ITS) studies.² This offers the opportunity to clarify some important issues related to ITS and controlled ITS (CITS) designs and their comparison with other methods applied for public health evaluation. In particular, we argue that Benmarhnia and Rudolph based their assessment on three incorrect premises: that ITS without control is not a valid design for assessing causal relationships; that CITS is just another name for the difference-in-difference (DID) design that they advocate; and that the synthetic control methodology represents an alternative to CITS.

中文翻译：

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差异差异，受控的中断时间序列和综合控制。

我们感谢Benmarhnia和Rudolph ¹对我们最近有关中断时间序列（ITS）研究中使用控件的文章的严格评估。²这为澄清与ITS和受控ITS（CITS）设计相关的一些重要问题，以及将其与其他用于公共卫生评估的方法进行比较提供了机会。特别是，我们认为Benmarhnia和Rudolph的评估基于三个不正确的前提：没有控制权的ITS并不是评估因果关系的有效设计；CITS只是他们倡导的差异化（DID）设计的别称；并且综合控制方法论是CITS的替代方案。