EPI 320 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Appendicitis, Prevalence, Causal Inference
Document Summary
Office hours: mondays 2:30-3:20 @ f-359 or email for private meetings. Introduce epidemiologic concepts: cover new vocabulary, discuss study design and their applications, learn basic analytic techniques. Grading policy: midterm (22%) on monday, 4/23 @ 3:30-5:@0, final (33%) on thursday, 6/7 @ 2:30-4:20, 2 discussion section quizzes (10%, homework (15%) Health and disease are not randomly distributed in the population. We start with disease: disease = any health outcome under study, infectious/non-infectious, acute/chronic, present from birth/arising later, physical/mental outcomes. A: none of the above malaria, gun violence, skin cancer, lack of health insurance all are potential outcomes. Then identify a population: need defined population to study patterns of disease, combination of choice and convenience to identify. Gathering information: ask questions to population by examining health related data, existing records, medical records, pharmacy records, census, disease registries, primary data collection, medical examinations, lab tests, health surveys.
