Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states and in specified populations and the application to control health problems. Classified as either descriptive or analytical, a variety of epidemiologic approaches can be used to allow assessment of hypothesized risk factor exposure with disease outcomes. This article reviews salient aspects of epidemiologic ...

Water chlorination can lead to the formation of disinfection byproducts, including trihalomethanes (THMs). However, few epidemiologic studies have explored associations between THM exposure and mortality. This study included 6720 adults aged ≥40 years from National Health Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2012 who had blood concentrations quantified. A higher risk all-cause mortality was found ...

The insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) axis has been proposed to be a significant factor in the development of certain cancers, including colorectal. However, results from epidemiologic studies suggest modest effects on colorectal cancer risk. Using cross-sectional and prospective study designs within the same cohort of men who had at least one adenoma at baseline, we investigated whether pla...

Background: The brain cancer etiology is poorly understood, although several studies indicate that residents of agricultural regions have an increased risk of mortality, the hypothesis being the intense exposure to pesticides. Both the trend and the age-periodcohort effect of brain cancer mortality in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, were estimated. Methods: This is a descriptive epidemiologic study of ...

BACKGROUND Organochlorine (OC) pesticides are a group of environmental endocrine disruptors that may be associated with an increased risk for hormone-related cancers including cancers of the breast and prostate. However, epidemiologic evidence is limited and inconsistent. OBJECTIVES AND METHODS We used 1999-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data to examine associations bet...

Oxidative stress plays an important role in carcinogenesis, but few epidemiologic studies have examined associations with risk of colorectal cancer. Relationships between serum levels of oxidized low-density lipoprotein (oxLDL) and oxLDL antibody (oLAB) and colorectal cancer risk were investigated in a case-control study nested in the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study for Evaluation of Cancer Ri...

Race has been identified as an important risk factor for the development of sepsis and as a predictor of poor outcomes in sepsis. For example, black individuals have been demonstrated to be nearly twice as likely to develop sepsis and to have greater mortality from sepsis than white individuals. Recent data from a longitudinal cohort, which examined incident hospitalizations for infections occu...

BACKGROUND Quantiles are a staple of epidemiologic research: in contemporary epidemiologic practice, continuous variables are typically categorized into tertiles, quartiles and quintiles as a means to illustrate the relationship between a continuous exposure and a binary outcome. DISCUSSION In this paper we argue that this approach is highly problematic and present several potential alternati...

Causal diagrams have a long history of informal use and, more recently, have undergone formal development for applications in expert systems and robotics. We provide an introduction to these developments and their use in epidemiologic research. Causal diagrams can provide a starting point for identifying variables that must be measured and controlled to obtain unconfounded effect estimates. The...

INTRODUCTION Dental caries is still a social problem in many countries, including Poland. Through epidemiological studies conducted in index groups among children and adults, it is possible to monitor its progress and take appropriate action. The Podlaskie region is an area where the severity of dental caries in children has been the highest in the country for a few years, both in urban and rur...