Obesity is an important public health problem worldwide. Epidemiological studies have demonstrated that obesity is associated with an increased risk of several cancer types. Also, obesity is associated with an increase in cancer mortality. Biological mechanisms and the relationship between obesity and cancer are complex and not well understood. Studies on the role of adiposederived factors in c...

Medicina Balear 2014; 29 (3): 10-17 Bayesian networks (BNs)16, 25 also referred to as causal networks or beliefs networks, are a form of statistical modelling which allow us to obtain a graphical network describing the dependencies and conditional independencies from empirical data. They have proven to be a promising tool for discovering relationships9, they capture the way an expert understand...

The measurement of bronchial reactivity in epidemiological studies has the advantage of quantifying an objective physiological feature of asthma. Bronchial reactivity was developed in a clinical setting and has been conventionally expressed as the dose of agonist producing a 20% fall in FEV1 (PD20). As PD20 can be estimated for less than 20% of subjects in general community surveys with the dos...

hormonal and reproductive factors, and finally environental influences, the main one being occupational and leisure time activities. The outcome of osteoarthritis and its predictors was also considered in a separate session. These themes were introduced by plenary lectures and an invited discussant then evaluated the material presented, together with newer data from the proffered abstracts. The...

The prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has been extensively studied, especially in Western Europe and North America. Few of these data are directly comparable because of differences between the surveys regarding composition of study populations, diagnostic criteria of the disease and definitions of the risk factors. Few community studies have examined phenotypes of COPD ...

Ordinal logistic regression models have been developed for analysis of epidemiological studies. However, the adequacy of such models for adjustment has so far received little attention. In this article, we reviewed the most important ordinal regression models and common approaches used to verify goodness-of-fit, using R or Stata programs. We performed formal and graphical analyses to compare or...

Yersinia enterocolitica is the most common bacteriological cause of gastrointestinal disease in many developed and developing countries. Although contaminated food is the main source of human infection due to Y. enterocolitica, animal reservoir and contaminated environment are also considered as other possible infection sources for human in epidemiological studies. Molecular based epidemiologic...

The aim of this study was to identify and discuss validity aspects on so called negative and non-positive studies. Arguments and examples are drawn from experiences in occupational health epidemiology regarding the interpretation of more or less equivocal study results. A negative study may be defined as showing a result that goes against the investigated hypothesis of an increased (or prevente...

Cohort studies based upon clinic populations and medical records are becoming more abundant due in part to an increasing trend toward electronic medical records and advancement in information technology. This design has been utilized in the HIV setting to great success and involves following individuals as they access medical care. These clinical cohort designs have not been compared to the cla...

The possible hazards of occupational exposure on the reproductive health of workers is of great interest. In this review, epidemiological study designs suitable for reproductive studies and sources of outcome and exposure data are described with a few examples. Studies have been conducted on hormonal changes, semen quality, fertility, and various outcomes of pregnancy, e.g., spontaneous abortio...