PUBHLTH 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Null Hypothesis, Socioeconomics

• School: UC-Irvine
• Department: Public Health
• Course: PUBHLTH 101
• Professor: David Timberlake

Document Summary

Establish specific criteria for diagnosis and inclusion of cases. One method involves ascertaining cases from a well-defined source population: hospitals or clinics, hmos, disease registries, advertisements. An alternative: select a probability sample of cases from the population. Objective is to ensure that exposure preceded the outcome (i. e. temporal sequence: thus, we prefer use of incident cases, but determination of incident cases is not so easy. Incident cases are usually defined as newly diagnosed cases: date of diagnosis is used as a proxy for disease initiation. Often most difficult aspect of this study because of potential for bias. Many believe that controls should be representative of a source population, that is the population from which cases and controls had originated. Hospital-based controls: persons seeking medical care at the same institutions as the cases for conditions believed unrelated to the cases/ diagnoses.