Epidemiology (du coup) Flashcards
What are the 2 main types of descriptives studies ?
- Individual level
- Populational level (ecological)
What is the goal of descriptive studies? What information is crucial for that kind of studies ?
- Goals
- Hypothesis generating
- Demonstrating trends
- Resource allocation
- Need for education
- Question
- Who : age, sex, race
- What : diseases usually, programs sometimes (before/after implementing it)
- When : calendar type, season
- Whre : country, povince, city
- What is the main limitation of ecological or correlationnal (aka descriptive study at a population level) descriptive study?
- How is this kind of study done ?
- Ecologic fallacy : interpretation of statistical data where inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inference for the group to which those individuals belong
- It’s basically a superposition of 2 descriptive studies : one of disease and one of exposure to make an hypothesis about those 2 things at the population level
What are the advantages of analytical: observational studies?
- Representative populations
- Represents routine clinical practice
- Usually more time and cost-efficient than clinical trials
What are the limitations of analytical: observational studies?
More susceptible to bias
What are the 3 types of observational studies?
- Cohorte
- Cross-sectional
- Case-control (includes nested studies)
What is a cohort study and its advantages?
- Designated group of individuals, who are followed or traced over a period of time. We compare those exposed and those NOT exposed
- we also classify by exposure and compare outcome/event rates
- Advantages
- Can study multiple diseases/outcomes
- Exposure more clearly precedes disease
- May be only way to study rare exposures
What are the limitations of a cohort study?
- Major difficulty is loss to follow up
- Not efficient for rare diseases, long latency
What is a cross-sectional study and its advantages/disadvantages?
- Gather data on exposure and disease simultaneously
- Limitation: What came first? Exposure or disease?
What is a case-control study? What’s its main advantages ?
- Subjects are selected based upon the OUTCOME: presence (case) or absence (control) of a particular disease
- Advantages
- Only rare diseases
- Mimics the clinical paradigm
- Simultaneous assessment of multiple exposures
- Should include all incident cases and come from and represent the same population
What are the limitations of a case-control study?
- Not good for rare exposures
- Often a challenge in field study to have the same population of origin
What are the goal and the 2 types of analytical: experimental studies?
Goal: Try to determine causality, studies of prognosis
Types:
- RCT
- Systematic review
What is Rate Ratio?
Incidence in exposed
___________________
Incidence in unexposed
What is hazard ratio?
Time to event in exposed
____________________
Time to event in unexposed
What is risk ratio?
Cumulative incidence in exposed
__________________________
Cumulative incidence in unexposed
What is Odds ratio? How do you calulate it ? How do you interpret it ?
- Odds of exposure in cases / odds of exposure in controls
- = ad / bc
- people who have an injury (cases) have (insert odds ratio number) times more chance of having the exposure
What is attributable risk?
incidence risk of exposed population – incidence risk of un-exposed population
- gives you a number of cases we could have prevented without the exposure / time on which the incidence rate is calculated