background: tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable mortality. the prevalence of smoking in adolescents in high schools ranges from 23.5% to 41%, respectively. in colombia, these figures are similar and students entering the university are exposed to initiate smoking. the purpose of this study was to establish the determinants associated with the initiation of tobacco smoking among ...

In the past two decades, public health researchers have taken renewed interest in investigating the role of social factors in health. This holds substantial promise in terms of identifying manipulable social factors that are amenable to policy intervention. Most existing empirical and conceptual epidemiologic work, however, has focused on the more proximal social determinants, such as interpers...

Background: Although self-reported questionnaires are widely employed in epidemiologic studies, their validity has not been sufficiently assessed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the a questionnaire on medication use by comparison with health insurance claims and identify individual determinants discordance Tsuruoka Metabolomics Cohort Study.

Pneumonic plague poses a potentially increasing risk to humans in plague nonendemic regions either as a consequence of an aerosolized release or through importation of the disease. Pneumonic plague is person-to-person transmissible. We provide a quantitative assessment of transmissibility based on past outbreaks that shows that the average number of secondary cases per primary case (R0) was 1.3...

In this introduction to volume 31 of Epidemiologic Reviews, the author traces the history of health disparities research in epidemiology and situates the 10 review articles comprising this edition within this history. With the aid of a conceptual model describing the key determinants of health disparities, he offers several suggestions for improving future epidemiologic research on health dispa...

While tumor volume and Gleason scores are the best available prognostic indicators for prostate cancer, contemporary predictive methods are unable to identify which men with Gleason scores of 7 have clinically insignificant tumors that will not progress and which men will develop highly aggressive prostate cancer. Our objective was to evaluate potential environmental determinants of significant...

Genetic epidemiology is increasingly focused on the study of common diseases with both genetic and environmental determinants. The concept of geneenvironment interaction is becoming a central theme in epidemiologic studies that assess causes of human disease in populations (1). Advances in genetic technology and the work of the Human Genome Project will make it easier for the study of gene-envi...