EPID 301 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Carcinoma, Random Variable, The Bmj

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Community Health and Epidemiology
• Course: EPID 301
• Professor: Helene Ouellette-Kuntz

Document Summary

Chapter 2: epidemiological reasoning: the fundamental assumption. Fundamental assumption: diseases do not distribute randomly in populations, but rather distribute in relation to their determinants. **studying associations between exposures and disease is the (cid:281)bread and butter(cid:282) of analytical epidemiology (cid:281)correlation is not causation(cid:282) = association between 2 variables does not mean that 1 is causing the other. The reason epidemiology can inform etiology is that, for epidemiologists, questions of cause are related to public health actions, not mechanistic conceptions of cause. In 1950, doll and hill published a study in the british medical journal called (cid:281)smoking and carcinoma of the lung: preliminary report(cid:282) **the power of epidemiological research to identify etiological connections in the absence of a thorough pathophysiological understanding is clear. If epidemiological evidence confirms that a public health or clinical action will lead to improved health, then a casual effect has been identified.