BACKGROUND Socioeconomic status (SES) is usually measured by determining education, income, occupation, or a composite of these dimensions. Although education is the most commonly used measure of SES in epidemiological studies, no investigators in the United States have conducted an empirical analysis quantifying the relative impact of each separate dimension of SES on risk factors for disease....

This issue of Epidemiologic Reviews on cohort studies is published five decades after the initiation of the Framingham study, one of the landmark investigations of epidemiologic research and, more generally, contemporary biomedical research. Within a few years other cohort studies—for example, of British physicians and of the atomic bomb survivors—were initiated. As follow-up of the participant...

Observational studies have assessed endemic waterborne risks in a number of countries. Time-series analyses associated increased water turbidity with increased gastroenteritis risks in several public water systems. Several cohort studies reported an increased risk of gastroenteritis in populations using certain public or individual water systems. Although several case-control studies found incr...

In a case-control study undertaken in several hospitals in Connecticut, it was found that women who reported smoking more than 20 cigarettes a day during pregnancy had a relative risk of about 1.6 for congenital malformations in the offspring of that pregnancy compared with women who said they had not smoked at all during pregnancy. However, there was no significant increase in risk among women...

A recent and comprehensive review of the use of race and ethnicity in research that address health disparities in epidemiology and public health is provided. First it is described the theoretical basis upon which race and ethnicity differ drawing from previous work in anthropology, social science and public health. Second, it is presented a review of 280 articles published in high impacts facto...

To date, epidemiologic research on 1,3-butadiene has consisted of cohort mortality studies of workers in the styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) and butadiene monomer industries. These studies have been extremely useful both in defining the focus on human health effects to the lymphopoietic cancers and in providing a perspective on which to evaluate the available animal models for human risk assessm...

Background/Aim. Dietary glycemic index (GI) has received considerable research interest over the past 25 years although its application to pregnancy outcomes is more recent. This paper critically evaluates the current evidence regarding the effect of dietary GI on maternal and fetal nutrition. Methods. A systematic literature search using MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, SCOPUS, and I...

We analyze bibliometric trends of topics relevant to the epidemiologic research of social determinants of health. A search of the PubMed database, covering the period 1985-2007, was performed for the topics: socioeconomic factors, sex, race/ethnicity, discrimination/prejudice, social capital/support, lifecourse, income inequality, stress, behavioral research, contextual effects, residential seg...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the present study was to examine the experimental and epidemiologic evidence linking benzodiazepine use to driving impairment. DATA SOURCES We searched MEDLINE, PsycINFO, the Cochrane Collaboration, and EMBASE using the key terms ("benzodiazepines" OR "exp benzodiazepines") AND ("automobile driving" OR "accidents, traffic" OR "driving" OR "driver$") and limited the re...

BACKGROUND There is a growing literature showing associations between prenatal and early-life exposure to air pollution and children's neurodevelopment. However, it is unclear if decrements in neurodevelopment observed in epidemiologic research translate into observable functional outcomes in the broader pediatric population. The objective of this study was to examine the association between ea...