Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Epidemiology is…
- 2 How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
- 3 Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology
- 4 Healthy research: study designs for public health
- 5 Why? Linking exposure and disease
- 6 Heads or tails: the role of chance
- 7 All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error
- 8 Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding
- 9 Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers
- 10 Who sank the boat? Association and causation
- 11 Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses
- 12 Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters
- 13 Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence
- 14 Prevention: better than cure?
- 15 Early detection: what benefits at what cost?
- 16 A final word…
- Answers to questions
- Appendix 1 Direct standardisation
- Appendix 2 Standard populations
- Appendix 3 Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data
- Appendix 4 Indirect standardisation
- Appendix 5 Calculating life expectancy from a life table
- Appendix 6 The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios
- Appendix 7 Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures
- Glossary
- Index
- References
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
4 - Healthy research: study designs for public health
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- 1 Epidemiology is…
- 2 How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency
- 3 Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology
- 4 Healthy research: study designs for public health
- 5 Why? Linking exposure and disease
- 6 Heads or tails: the role of chance
- 7 All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error
- 8 Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding
- 9 Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers
- 10 Who sank the boat? Association and causation
- 11 Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses
- 12 Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters
- 13 Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence
- 14 Prevention: better than cure?
- 15 Early detection: what benefits at what cost?
- 16 A final word…
- Answers to questions
- Appendix 1 Direct standardisation
- Appendix 2 Standard populations
- Appendix 3 Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data
- Appendix 4 Indirect standardisation
- Appendix 5 Calculating life expectancy from a life table
- Appendix 6 The Mantel-Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios
- Appendix 7 Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures
- Glossary
- Index
- References
Summary
Box 4.1 Oranges and lemons
In 1747, James Lind conducted an experiment to test six different cures for scurvy. While at sea, he identified 12 patients with scurvy whose ‘cases were as similar as I could find them’ and prescribed a different treatment to each pair of patients. After a few days he found that the two patients fortunate enough to have been prescribed oranges and lemons were almost fully recovered whilst no improvement was seen in the other ten, who had been subjected to various regimens including sea-water, gruel, cider and various elixirs. From this, Lind inferred that inclusion of citrus fruit in the diet of sailors would not only cure, but also prevent scurvy. Limes or lime juice thus became a part of the diet on ships, earning British sailors their nickname of ‘limeys’
(Lind, 1753).When we discussed what epidemiologists do in Chapter 1, we touched on some of the different types of study that we use to collect the information we need to answer questions about health. In Chapter 3 we looked at the descriptive studies that provide the ‘bread-and-butter’ information of public health; in this chapter we will look at the analytic studies that are our main tools for identifying the causes of disease and evaluating health interventions. Unlike descriptive epidemiology, analytic studies involve planned comparisons between people with and without disease, or between people with and without exposures thought to cause disease.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Essential EpidemiologyAn Introduction for Students and Health Professionals, pp. 94 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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