Exam 4: Epidemiology: Introduction and Basic Concepts

Prevalence and incidence measures are related in the following way: a prevalent case is also counted in an incidence measure, so incidence is always higher than prevalence.

A proportion differs from a rate in that that a proportion includes a unit of time in the denominator as in, per year).

Descriptive epidemiology includes all of the following pieces of information EXCEPT:

Epidemiology deals mostly with quantitative data rather than qualitative data.

When comparing mortality rates in a population across time, it is not necessary to adjust for any confounders since the average age of a population will be stable across years.

Most activities carried out by epidemiologists fall under the assessment core function of public health.

If we know that teenagers are smoking less often now than teenagers were in 1980, which piece of descriptive epidemiology do we have?

Influenza flu) cases most commonly occur in the winter months and most people recover within two weeks of onset. Based on this information, which of the following statements is true?

Epidemiology is only concerned with understanding the risk factors for bad outcomes or quantifying the negative health effects of bad exposures.

We are designing a study to quantify the risk of diabetes among people who are obese body mass index [BMI]>30) compared to people who are neither overweight nor obese BMI<25). Family history is known to be an important risk factor for diabetes. What would we call family history in this study?

Epidemiologists assume that diseases are multifactorial have many causes) and that these causes can be measured and identified.

If we modify the infant mortality rate to account for the average age of mothers across different countries, what kind of rate would be creating?

If one mapped the cases of a particular illness, much like John Snow did with cholera in the 1800s, the information contained in the map geographic location and distribution of disease) would be considered part of the analytic epidemiology of the disease.

The table below shows information about testicular cancer and population size in the town of Rockville in 2010. What was the incidence rate of testicular cancer in Rockville in 2010?

The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation is working to estimate the number of people living with paralysis in the United States. What will this number be?

A confounder is any variable other than the exposure or outcome) that can confuse the relationship between an exposure and outcome of interest.

If a researcher is interested in whether eating dairy products is related to developing diabetes, an epidemiologist would call diabetes the in the study.

When calculating incidence, the population at risk - only those individuals who have a nonzero chance of experiencing the outcome - should be used in the denominator.

Epidemiologists are primarily concerned with:

At the beginning of a study, a researcher makes a statement about what he or she expects the relationship between an exposure and an outcome to be. This statement is called an) .