Epidemiology Notes

Epidemiology concerned with distribution and determinants of health and diseases morbidity, injuries, disability and mortality in population groups not among individuals. Often referred to as population medicine.
Epidemiologic studies are applied to control health problems in populations. Concerned with efforts to describe explain predict and control.
Determinants- are factors or events that are capable of bringing about a change in health. Examples are specific biologic agents that are associated with infectious diseases such as bacteria, and chemical agents that may act as carcinogens. Can be stress, overeating, bad diets.
Distribution – variance of disease occurrence in population illustrate how disease may have different distributions depending upon underlying characteristics of populations being studied.
Characteristics of the epidemiologic approach
Describe the health status of populations. enumerate cases, obtain frequency, discover trends.
Explain etiology of disease to discover causal factors as well as to determine modes of transmission.
Predict occurrence of disease is to estimate actual number of cases that will develop as to identify the distribution within populations. Crucial to planning interventions and allocation of healthcare resources.
Control distribution of disease the epidemiologic approach is used to prevent occurrence of new cases of disease to eradicate existing cases and to prolong lives of those with disease.
Epidemiology is an interdisciplinary field that draws from biostatistics and social and behavioral sciences as well as from the medically related fields of toxicology, pathology, virology, genetics microbiology and clinical medicine.
Biostatistics is critical to the evaluation of epidemiologic data. The contributions of many disciplines help unravel the factors associated with a particular disease.
Quantification refers to translation of qualitative impressions into numbers and it is a central activity of