The case-crossover design was introduced in epidemiology 15 years ago as a method for studying the effects of a risk factor on a health event using only cases. The idea is to compare a case's exposure immediately prior to or during the case-defining event with that same person's exposure at otherwise similar "reference" times. An alternative approach to the analysis of daily exposure and case-o...

Bringing epidemiology and toxicology together to better understand cause and effect relationships requires attention to several interconnected problems: problems of commitment, complexity, and of communication. The most fundamental of these is commitment as it is reflected in the basic purpose of environmental epidemiology. The purpose of epidemiology is not to prove cause-effect relationships,...

Environmental epidemiology comprises the epidemiologic study of those environmental factors that are outside the immediate control of the individual. Exposures of interest to environmental epidemiologists include air pollution, water pollution, occupational exposure to physical and chemical agents, as well as psychosocial elements of environmental concern. The main methodologic problem in envir...

In environmental epidemiology research, decisions about when and how to intervene requires adequate ethical reflection. In fact, different kinds of issues may arise about: research methods and knowledge production; management of the results in terms of their overall assessments or for the implementation of preventive actions; reclamation intervention. In this contribution we propose to consider...

The need to integrate ethics into professional life, from the grassroots up, has been recognized, and a comprehensive ethics program has been proposed as a model. The model includes the four dimensions of: consensus building, ethics guidelines development and review, education, and implementation. The activities of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) are presented as...

Extrapolation from occupational data to general environmental exposures gives some interesting results, and these results might be useful in our decision-making process. These results could never be observed by environmental epidemiology and this method probably represents the only way of quantifying the health effects of low-exposure levels. Three linear models for extrapolating to low levels ...

1 Laboratory of Environmental Modelling, Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales, Technical University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, 2 Air and Environment Quality, Ricardo Energy and Environment, London, UK, Department of Geosciences, Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain, Cancer and ...

Epidemiology Branch, National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (Q Xu and H Chen); Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (Y Song); Nutritional Epidemiology Branch and Occupational and Environmental Epidemiology Branch, National Cancer Institute, Rockville, MD (A Blair, A Schatzkin); AARP,...

In observational research, evidence is usually derived from multiple studies, and any single result is rarely considered sufficient for public health decision making. Despite more than five decades of research and thousands of studies published, the ability to draw robust conclusions regarding the presence or absence of causal links between specific environmental exposures and human health rema...