Firearm violence is the end result of a causative web of individual-level and geographic risk factors. Few, if any, studies of firearm violence have been able to simultaneously determine the population-based relative risks that individuals experience as a result of what they were doing at a specific point in time and where they were, geographically, at a specific point in time. This paper descr...

As a result of the Human Genome Project, epidemiologists can study thousands of genes and their interaction with the environment. The challenge is how to best present and analyze such studies of multiple genetic and environmental factors. The authors suggest emphasizing the fundamental core of gene-environment interaction-the separate assessment of the effects of individual and joint risk facto...

Clinical studies that use observational databases to evaluate the effects of medical products have become commonplace. Such studies begin by selecting a particular database, a decision that published papers invariably report but do not discuss. Studies of the same issue in different databases, however, can and do generate different results, sometimes with strikingly different clinical implicati...

Studies on the association between arsenic exposure and diabetes mellitus (DM) yielded inconsistent results. Epidemiologic data on the associations between arsenic exposures via inhalation and DM are limited. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to evaluate the risk of DM associated with arsenic exposure. We searched the related literature through a systematic approach and analyzed the data ...

In a relative risk analysis of colorectal caner on nutrition intake scores across genders, we show that, surprisingly, when comparing the relative risks for men and women based on the index of a weighted sum of various nutrition scores, the problem reduces to forming a confidence interval for the ratio of two (asymptotically) normal random variables. The latter is an old problem, with a substan...

BACKGROUND Dental caries is unevenly distributed within populations with a higher burden in low socio-economy groups. Several attempts have been made to allocate resources to those that need them the most; there is a need for convenient approaches to population-based monitoring of caries risk over time. The aim of this study was to develop the geo-map concept, addressing time trends in caries r...

Instrumental variable analyses are increasingly used in epidemiologic studies. For dichotomous exposures and outcomes, the typical 2-stage least squares approach produces risk difference estimates rather than relative risk estimates and is criticized for assuming normally distributed errors. Using 2 example drug safety studies evaluated in 3 cohorts from Pennsylvania (1994-2003) and British Col...

OBJECTIVES We propose a novel approach to examine vulnerability in the relationship between heat and years of life lost and apply to neighborhood social disparities in Montreal and Paris. METHODS We used historical data from the summers of 1990 through 2007 for Montreal and from 2004 through 2009 for Paris to estimate daily years of life lost social disparities (DYLLD), summarizing social ine...

BACKGROUND Caesarean section (CS) rate is a quality of health care indicator frequently used at national and international level. The aim of this study was to assess whether adjustment for Robson's Ten Group Classification System (TGCS), and clinical and socio-demographic variables of the mother and the fetus is necessary for inter-hospital comparisons of CS rates. METHODS The study populatio...

With the growing number of epidemiologic publications on the relation between dietary factors and cancer risk, pooled analyses that summarize results from multiple studies are becoming more common. Here, the authors describe the methods being used to summarize data on diet-cancer associations within the ongoing Pooling Project of Prospective Studies of Diet and Cancer, begun in 1991. In the Poo...