Study Designs in Epidemiologic Research.ppt

* Case series From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /wiki/Case_series * Descriptive study designs include case reports, case series, incidence studies, and ecologic studies. The case report is the most elementary study design in the literature. It generally describes an injury or injuries to one or two individuals that have been identified in a medical setting. There is also usually a unique feature to the noted chronic disease . The case series design is an extension of the case report. In a case series, a number of events are described. These events usually have been observed over a set period of time (such as one year) and are identified from one reporting source (e.g. a hospital). The descriptive epidemiology study is noted by the collection of events over a defined population base and by the use of denominator data to determine rates. The most frequent information generated from these designs are incidence rates for injuries. The ecologic study is a hypothesis generating study. Usually using group-level data, it examines if two factors are correlated with each other. * Responses to this question vary. As outlined below, some believe that altruistically, society should pursue disease prevention to improve health and save money. These are noble goals, but I will demonstrate later that prevention does not always save money. The desire to prevent NCDs probably is a repercussion of our efforts to prevent infectious diseases. We have had great success in preventing communicable diseases. This has led to an initiative to prevent NCDs. * An Introduction to Epidemiology (CDC) /excite/classroom/intro_epi.htm * Experimental studies are stronger in determining the etiology of disease than descriptive studies * * Cross section al studies are some of the first studies completed because of ease and low cost * Cross-sectional studies examine a point in time * Cross-sectional studies involve point prevalence, not incidence. For very infrequent diseases they