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Causal inference requires an understanding of the conditions under which association equals causation. The exchangeability or no confounding assumption is well known and well understood as central to this task...
The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) is a public data repository that harmonizes four decades of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). The NHIS is the premier source of information on the healt...
The past five years have seen a growth in the interest in systems approaches in epidemiologic research. These approaches may be particularly appropriate for social epidemiology. Social network analysis and age...
In molecular epidemiology studies biospecimen data are collected, often with the purpose of evaluating the synergistic role between a biomarker and another feature on an outcome. Typically, biomarker data are ...
This commentary intends to instigate discussions about epidemiologic estimates and their interpretation of attributable fractions (AFs) and the burden of disease (BOD) of cancers due to factors at workplaces. ...
Adherence to a medical treatment means the extent to which a patient follows the instructions or recommendations by health professionals. There are direct and indirect ways to measure adherence which have been...
Most common diseases demonstrate familial aggregation; the ratio of the risk for relatives of affected people to the risk for relatives of unaffected people (the familial risk ratio)) > 1. This implies there a...
The WINPEPI computer programs for epidemiologists are designed for use in practice and research in the health field and as learning or teaching aids. The programs are free, and can be downloaded from the Inter...
Effectively responding to infectious disease outbreaks requires a well-informed response. Quantitative methods for analyzing outbreak data and estimating key parameters to characterize the spread of the outbre...
This commentary intends to instigate discussions about upcoming epidemiologic research, and its interpretation, into putative links between shift work, involving circadian disruption or chronodisruption [CD], ...
Standard logistic regression with or without stepwise selection has the disadvantage of not incorporating model uncertainty and the dependency of estimates on the underlying model into the final inference. We ...
Reports of observational epidemiological studies often categorise (group) continuous risk factor (exposure) variables. However, there has been little systematic assessment of how categorisation is practiced or...
The purpose of this paper was to compare two mathematical procedures to estimate the annual attributable number of deaths (the Allison et al procedure and the Mokdad et al procedure), and derive a new procedur...
A person can experience an effect on the occurrence of an outcome in a defined follow-up period without experiencing an effect on the risk of that outcome over the same period. Sufficient causes are sometimes ...
Sufficient causes of disease are redundant when an individual acquires the components of two or more sufficient causes. In this circumstance, the individual still would have become diseased even if one of the ...
This paper describes how to fit an additive Poisson model using standard software. It is illustrated with SAS code, but can be similarly used for other software packages.
Schistosomiasis infection, contracted through contact with contaminated water, is a global public health concern. In this paper we analyze data from a retrospective study reporting water contact and schistosom...
Identifying diet-disease relationships in nutritional cohort studies is plagued by the measurement error in self-reported intakes.
In epidemiologic studies, cancer stage is an important predictor of outcomes. However, cancer stage is typically unavailable in medical insurance claims datasets, thus limiting the usefulness of such data for ...
Regression adjustment for the propensity score is a statistical method that reduces confounding from measured variables in observational data. A Bayesian propensity score analysis extends this idea by using si...
In 1986 the International Journal of Epidemiology published "Identifiability, Exchangeability and Epidemiological Confounding". We review the article from the perspective of a quarter century after it was firs...
We are pleased to publish an update to "Identifiabiliity, exchangeability and epidemiological confounding" (IEEC) by Sander Greenland and James Robins, originally published in 1986 in the International Journal...
As noted by Wesley Salmon and many others, causal concepts are ubiquitous in every branch of theoretical science, in the practical disciplines and in everyday life. In the theoretical and practical sciences es...
One possibility for the statistical evaluation of trends in epidemiological exposure studies is the use of a trend test for data organized in a 2 × k contingency table. Commonly, the exposure data are naturally g...
The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is a continuous, nationwide, household interview survey of the civilian noninstitutionalized population of the United States. This annual survey is conducted by the ...
Many epidemiological methods for analysing follow-up studies require the calculation of rates based on accumulating person-time and events, stratified by various factors. Managing this stratification and accum...
Case-control studies and outbreak investigations are the major epidemiological tools for providing detailed information on enteric disease sources and risk factors, but these investigations can be constrained ...
While the population attributable fraction (PAF) provides potentially valuable information regarding the community-level effect of risk factors, significant limitations exist with current strategies for estima...
The two-phase design consists of an initial (Phase One) study with known disease status and inexpensive covariate information. Within this initial study one selects a subsample on which to collect detailed cov...
Previous studies have demonstrated that the frequency with which a publication is cited varies greatly. Our objective was to determine whether author, country, journal, or topic were associated with the number...
Adjustment for covariates (also called auxiliary variables in survey sampling literature) is commonly applied in health surveys to reduce the variances of the prevalence estimators. In theory, adjusted prevale...
A goal in intimate partner violence (IPV) research is to identify victims when they are treated in a hospital Emergency Department (ED) and predict which patients will sustain abuse again after discharge, so i...
A growing body of health and policy research suggests residential neighborhood density and street connectivity affect walking and total physical activity, both of which are important risk factors for obesity a...
When carefully planned and analysed, the case-cohort design is a powerful choice for follow-up studies with multiple event types of interest. While the literature is rich with analysis methods for case-cohort ...
Although research has found that childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with physical and mental health in mid- and later life, most of these studies used conventional, single dimension SES measure...
This commentary accompanies two articles submitted to Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations in response to a call for papers about threats to epidemiology or epidemiologists from organized political interests....
While chronic exposure to secondhand smoke has been well recognized as a cause of heart disease in nonsmokers, there has been recent speculation about the potential acute cardiovascular effects of transient ex...
This analysis presents a detailed defense of my epidemiologic research in the May 17, 2003 British Medical Journal that found no significant relationship between environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and tobacco-rela...
Epidemiologic studies have identified a number of lifestyle factors, e.g. diet, obesity, and use of certain medications, which affect risk of colon cancer. However, the magnitude and significance of risk facto...
We suggest that the need to account for systematic error may explain the apparent lack of agreement among studies of maternal dietary methylmercury exposure and neuropsychological testing outcomes in children,...
Longitudinal studies are helpful in understanding how subtle associations between factors of interest change over time. Our goal is to apply statistical methods which are appropriate for analyzing longitudinal...
Little is known about the characteristics of people who do and do not agree to the long-term storage and use of their biological materials, or about potential biases that may be introduced as a result of diffe...
Population estimates are generally drawn from one point in time to study disease trends over time; changes in population characteristics over time are usually not assessed and included in the study design. We ...
Long term studies of childhood cancer survivors are hampered by difficulties in tracking young adult participants. After performing a National Death Index (NDI) search we sought to identify which factors best ...
Power for assessing interactions during data analysis is often poor in epidemiologic studies. This is because epidemiologic studies are frequently powered primarily to assess main effects only. In light of thi...
This paper critically discusses two previous studies concerned with predictions of HIV/AIDS in the United States and Japan during the early 1990s. Although the study in the US applied a historical theory, assu...
Societies are facing challenges as the public health burden increases in tandem with population aging. Local information systems are needed that would allow a continuous monitoring of the incidence and effecti...
Injury-related mortality rate estimates are often analyzed under the assumption that case counts follow a Poisson distribution. Certain types of injury incidents occasionally involve multiple fatalities, howev...
To examine the generalizability of two National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded double-blind randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials in patients with chronic Lyme disease and to determine whether selec...