This Review provides abstracts from a meeting held at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, on April 11-12, 2013, to celebrate the legacy of John Snow. They describe conventional and unconventional applications of epidemiological methods to problems ranging from diarrhoeal disease, mental health, cancer, and accident care, to education, poverty, financial networks, crime, and viol...

The prevalence of obesity and diabetes, which are heritable traits that arise from the interactions of multiple genes and lifestyle factors, continues to rise worldwide, causing serious health problems and imposing a substantial economic burden on societies. For the past 15 years, candidate gene and genome-wide linkage studies have been the main genetic epidemiological approaches to identify ge...

The control of syphilis in the United Kingdom and United States has been managed in different ways in each country over the course of the last century. Older more established measures including contact tracing, serological surveillance, and health education strategies together with effective antibiotic therapy have had some success. However, changing social structures on both sides of the Atlan...

BACKGROUND Mental disorders are strongly associated with disabilities. National survey on disability could provide a reliable basis for policymaking in care and rehabilitation of disabled persons. This study aimed to describe the disability prevalence rates attributed to mental disorders, their distribution by sociodemographic factors, and utilizations of service. METHODS This study is a seco...

BACKGROUND Health inequalities have been extensively documented, internationally and in New Zealand. The cost of reducing health inequities is often perceived as high; however, recent international studies suggest the cost of "doing nothing" is itself significant. This study aimed to develop a preliminary estimate of the economic cost of health inequities between Māori (indigenous) and non-Māor...

The aim of this study was to determine whether the degree of immobilization (method, extent, duration of treatment) affects the risk of refracture in the management of forearm buckle fractures. We performed a comprehensive systematic review of prospective trials using accepted epidemiological methods. Studies were selected in step-wise manner, in duplicate, with critical appraisal of identified...

The extended abstracts in this report are based on presentations from the Workshop on Decision-Making for Dietary Recommendations and Communication Based on Totality of Food-Related Research, which was organized and sponsored by the Technical Committees on Food and Chemical Safety, Lipids, and Carbohydrates of the North American Branch of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI North Am...

The classification of asthmatics into severity categories is a crucial issue for assessing the asthma burden within a community, in which a proportion of patients is currently treated. There is no epidemiological method currently available. The Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) was used to classify 4,362 patients aged 16-45 yrs (49% males, 42% taking inhaled corticosteroids), enrolled by 545 ...

Background: It is introduced that unintentional childhood poisoning can be as result of child home environment and characteristics of parents. This study aimed at quantifying the adjusted population attributable risk percentage of risk factor of unintentional childhood poisoning.  Materials and Methods: The hospital based case- control included 140 consecutive poisoned children who admitted to ...