Articles

Implementing effective community-based surveillance in research studies of maternal, newborn and infant outcomes in low resource settings

Globally adopted health and development milestones have not only encouraged improvements in the health and wellbeing of women and infants worldwide, but also a better understanding of the epidemiology of key o...

Authors: Caitlin Shannon, Chris Hurt, Seyi Soremekun, Karen Edmond, Sam Newton, Seeba Amenga-Etego, Charlotte Tawiah-Agyemang, Zelee Hill, Alexander Manu, Ben Weobong, Betty Kirkwood and Lisa Hurt

Maximizing community participation and engagement: lessons learned over 2 decades of field trials in rural Ghana

Successful implementation of community-based research is dominantly influenced by participation and engagement from the local community without which community members will not want to participate in research ...

Authors: Sam Newton, Guus Ten Asbroek, Zelee Hill, Charlotte Tawiah Agyemang, Seyi Soremekun, Seeba Amenga Etego and Betty Kirkwood

A simulation study of regression approaches for estimating risk ratios in the presence of multiple confounders

Risk ratio is a popular effect measure in epidemiological research. Although previous research has suggested that logistic regression may provide biased odds ratio estimates when the number of events is small ...

Authors: Kanako Fuyama, Yasuhiro Hagiwara and Yutaka Matsuyama

Teaching: confidence, prediction and tolerance intervals in scientific practice: a tutorial on binary variables

One of the emerging themes in epidemiology is the use of interval estimates. Currently, three interval estimates for confidence (CI), prediction (PI), and tolerance (TI) are at a researcher's disposal and are ...

Authors: Sonja Hartnack and Malgorzata Roos

Going digital: added value of electronic data collection in 2018 Afghanistan Health Survey

Through a nationally representative household survey in Afghanistan, we conducted an operational study in two relatively secure provinces comparing effectiveness of computer-aided personal interviewing (CAPI) ...

Authors: Christina Mergenthaler, Rajpal Singh Yadav, Sohrab Safi, Ente Rood and Sandra Alba

RSV: perspectives to strengthen the need for protection in all infants

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—the most common viral cause of bronchiolitis—is a significant cause of serious illness among young children between the ages of 0–5 years and is especially concerning in the f...

Authors: Jose Antonio Navarro Alonso, Louis J. Bont, Elena Bozzola, Egbert Herting, Federico Lega, Silke Mader, Marta C. Nunes, Octavio Ramilo, George Valiotis, Catherine Weil Olivier, Ann Yates and Saul N. Faust

Coauthorship by patients and other stakeholders with limited knowledge of scientific publishing practices

Authors: Steven S. Coughlin

Development of a women’s empowerment index for Tanzania from the demographic and health surveys of 2004–05, 2010, and 2015–16

Women’s empowerment is a multidimensional construct which varies by context. These variations make it challenging to have a concrete definition that can be measured quantitatively. Having a standard composite ...

Authors: Andrew Evarist Mganga, Jenny Renju, Jim Todd, Michael Johnson Mahande and Seema Vyas

A detailed explanation and graphical representation of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method with its application in health inequalities

This paper introduces the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method to be applied in explaining inequality in health outcome across any two groups. In order to understand every aspect of the inequality, multiple reg...

Authors: Ebrahim Rahimi and Seyed Saeed Hashemi Nazari

Cannons and sparrows II: the enhanced Bernoulli exact method for determining statistical significance and effect size in the meta-analysis of k 2 × 2 tables

The use of meta-analysis to aggregate the results of multiple studies has increased dramatically over the last 40 years. For homogeneous meta-analysis, the Mantel–Haenszel technique has typically been utilized...

Authors: Lawrence M. Paul

Situating agent-based modelling in population health research

Today’s most troublesome population health challenges are often driven by social and environmental determinants, which are difficult to model using traditional epidemiological methods. We agree with those who ...

Authors: Eric Silverman, Umberto Gostoli, Stefano Picascia, Jonatan Almagor, Mark McCann, Richard Shaw and Claudio Angione

Standard multiple imputation of survey data didn’t perform better than simple substitution in enhancing an administrative dataset: the example of self-rated health in England

Health surveys provide a rich array of information but on relatively small numbers of individuals and evidence suggests that they are becoming less representative as response levels fall. Routinely collected a...

Authors: Frank Popham, Elise Whitley, Oarabile Molaodi and Linsay Gray

Whatever can go wrong, need not go wrong: Open Quality approach for epidemiology

Quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of an epidemiological study, as its validity is largely determined by data quality. The mounting success of quality management in the industrial sector ca...

Authors: Sandra Alba and Masja Straetemans

Women’s voices on social media: the advent of feminist epidemiology?

Social media have in recent years challenged the way in which research questions are formulated in epidemiology and medicine, and in particular when it comes to women’s health. They have contributed to the eme...

Authors: Céline Miani and Yudit Namer

Birth weight and childhood obesity: effect modification by residence and household wealth

There are both genetic and environmental factors which contribute to a child’s chances of being obese. When low birth weight (LBW) has been specifically evaluated relative to its association with childhood obe...

Authors: Helen Andriani

Practical strategies for handling breakdown of multiple imputation procedures

Multiple imputation is a recommended method for handling incomplete data problems. One of the barriers to its successful use is the breakdown of the multiple imputation procedure, often due to numerical proble...

Authors: Cattram D. Nguyen, John B. Carlin and Katherine J. Lee

A cohort study of survival following discharge from hospital in rural Tanzanian children using linked data of admissions with community-based demographic surveillance

To illustrate the public health potential of linking individual bedside data with community-based household data in a poor rural setting, we estimated excess pediatric mortality risk after discharge from St Fr...

Authors: Oscar Mukasa, Honorati Masanja, Don DeSavigny and Joanna Schellenberg

Factors associated with age-disparate sexual partnerships among males and females in South Africa: a multinomial analysis of the 2012 national population-based household survey data

In South Africa, age-disparate to sexual relationships where the age difference between partners is 5 years or greater is an important contributor to the spread of HIV. However, little is known about the predi...

Authors: Musawenkosi Mabaso, Lungelo Mlangeni, Lehlogonolo Makola, Olanrewaju Oladimeji, Inbarani Naidoo, Yogandra Naidoo, Buyisile Chibi, Khangelani Zuma and Leickness Simbayi

Ensuring Emerging Themes in Epidemiology’s continued success

Authors: Steven S. Coughlin

Mitigation of biases in estimating hazard ratios under non-sensitive and non-specific observation of outcomes–applications to influenza vaccine effectiveness

Non-sensitive and non-specific observation of outcomes in time-to-event data affects event counts as well as the risk sets, thus, biasing the estimation of hazard ratios. We investigate how imperfect observati...

Authors: Ulrike Baum, Sangita Kulathinal and Kari Auranen

Comparing methods of performing geographically targeted rural health surveillance

Worsening socioeconomic conditions in rural America have been fueling increases in chronic disease and poor health. The goal of this study was to identify cost-effective methods of deploying geographically tar...

Authors: David C. Lee, Nancy A. McGraw, Kelly M. Doran, Amanda K. Mengotto, Sara L. Wiener, Andrew J. Vinson and Lorna E. Thorpe

Latent class instrumental variables and the monotonicity assumption

A key aspect of the article by Lousdal on instrumental variables was a discussion of the monotonicity assumption. However, there was no mention of the history of the development of this assumption. The purpose...

Authors: Stuart G. Baker

Response to: Simpson’s Paradox is suppression, but Lord’s Paradox is neither: clarification of and correction to Tu, Gunnell, and Gilthorpe (2008) by Nickerson CA & Brown NJL (https://doi.org/10.1186/1742-7622-5-2)

We commend Nickerson and Brown on their insightful exposition of the mathematical algebra behind Simpson’s paradox, suppression and Lord’s paradox; we also acknowledge there can be differences in how Lord’s pa...

Authors: Mark S. Gilthorpe and Yu-Kang Tu

Simpson’s Paradox is suppression, but Lord’s Paradox is neither: clarification of and correction to Tu, Gunnell, and Gilthorpe (2008)

Tu et al. (Emerg Themes Epidemiol 5:2, 2008. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1186/​1742-7622-5-2) asserted that suppression, Simpson’s Paradox, and Lord’s Paradox are all the same phenomenon—the reversal paradox. In the revers...

Authors: Carol A. Nickerson and Nicholas J. L. Brown

Prediction or interpretability?

The journal published a review of the literature on recursive partition in epidemiological research comparing two decision tree methods: classification and regression trees (CARTs) and conditional inference tr...

Authors: Stefano Nembrini

Health monitoring among asylum seekers and refugees: a state-wide, cross-sectional, population-based study in Germany

Health monitoring in Germany falls short on generating timely, reliable and representative data among migrants, especially transient and marginalized groups such as asylum seekers and refugees (ASR). We aim to...

Authors: Louise Biddle, Natalja Menold, Martina Bentner, Stefan Nöst, Rosa Jahn, Sandra Ziegler and Kayvan Bozorgmehr

(Re-) conceptualising vulnerability as a part of risk in global health emergency response: updating the pressure and release model for global health emergencies

Vulnerability has become a key concept in emergency response research and is being critically discussed across several disciplines. While the concept has been adopted into global health, its conceptualisation ...

Authors: Charlotte Christiane Hammer, Julii Brainard, Alexandria Innes and Paul R. Hunter

On the collapsibility of measures of effect in the counterfactual causal framework

The relationship between collapsibility and confounding has been subject to an extensive and ongoing discussion in the methodological literature. We discuss two subtly different definitions of collapsibility, ...

Authors: Anders Huitfeldt, Mats J. Stensrud and Etsuji Suzuki

Assessment of demographic and perinatal predictors of non-response and impact of non-response on measures of association in a population-based case control study: findings from the Georgia Study to Explore Early Development

Participation in epidemiologic studies has declined, raising concerns about selection bias. While estimates derived from epidemiologic studies have been shown to be robust under a wide range of scenarios, addi...

Authors: Laura A. Schieve, Shericka Harris, Matthew J. Maenner, Aimee Alexander and Nicole F. Dowling

The validity of an area-based method to estimate the size of hard-to-reach populations using satellite images: the example of fishing populations of Lake Victoria

Information on the size of populations is crucial for planning of service and resource allocation to communities in need of health interventions. In resource limited settings, reliable census data are often no...

Authors: Stephen Nash, Victoria Tittle, Andrew Abaasa, Richard E. Sanya, Gershim Asiki, Christian Holm Hansen, Heiner Grosskurth, Saidi Kapiga and Chris Grundy

Clarifying questions about “risk factors”: predictors versus explanation

In biomedical research much effort is thought to be wasted. Recommendations for improvement have largely focused on processes and procedures. Here, we additionally suggest less ambiguity concerning the questio...

Authors: C. Mary Schooling and Heidi E. Jones

Cannons and sparrows: an exact maximum likelihood non-parametric test for meta-analysis of k 2 × 2 tables

The use of meta-analysis to aggregate multiple studies has increased dramatically over the last 30 years. For meta-analysis of homogeneous data where the effect sizes for the studies contributing to the meta-a...

Authors: Lawrence M. Paul

Change in quality of malnutrition surveys between 1986 and 2015

Representative surveys collecting weight, height and MUAC are used to estimate the prevalence of acute malnutrition. The results are then used to assess the scale of malnutrition in a population and type of nu...

Authors: Emmanuel Grellety and Michael H. Golden

The contributions and future direction of Program Science in HIV/STI prevention

Program Science is an iterative, multi-phase research and program framework where programs drive the scientific inquiry, and both program and science are aligned towards a collective goal of improving populati...

Authors: Marissa Becker, Sharmistha Mishra, Sevgi Aral, Parinita Bhattacharjee, Rob Lorway, Kalada Green, John Anthony, Shajy Isac, Faran Emmanuel, Helgar Musyoki, Lisa Lazarus, Laura H. Thompson, Eve Cheuk and James F. Blanchard

Role of survey response rates on valid inference: an application to HIV prevalence estimates

Nationally-representative surveys suggest that females have a higher prevalence of HIV than males in most African countries. Unfortunately, these results are made on the basis of surveys with non-ignorable mi...

Authors: Miguel Marino and Marcello Pagano

Modelling fertility in rural South Africa with combined nonlinear parametric and semi-parametric methods

Central to the study of populations, and therefore to the analysis of the development of countries undergoing major transitions, is the calculation of fertility patterns and their dependence on different varia...

Authors: Robert W. Eyre, Thomas House, F. Xavier Gómez-Olivé and Frances E. Griffiths

Novel metrics for growth model selection

Literature surrounding the statistical modeling of childhood growth data involves a diverse set of potential models from which investigators can choose. However, the lack of a comprehensive framework for compa...

Authors: Matthew R. Grigsby, Junrui Di, Andrew Leroux, Vadim Zipunnikov, Luo Xiao, Ciprian Crainiceanu and William Checkley

Effect of correcting for gestational age at birth on population prevalence of early childhood undernutrition

Postmenstrual and/or gestational age-corrected age (CA) is required to apply child growth standards to children born preterm (< 37 weeks gestational age). Yet, CA is rarely used in epidemiologic studies in low...

Authors: Nandita Perumal, Daniel E. Roth, Johnna Perdrizet, Aluísio J. D. Barros, Iná S. Santos, Alicia Matijasevich and Diego G. Bassani

Contextual factors in maternal and newborn health evaluation: a protocol applied in Nigeria, India and Ethiopia

Understanding the context of a health programme is important in interpreting evaluation findings and in considering the external validity for other settings. Public health researchers can be imprecise and inco...

Authors: Kate Sabot, Tanya Marchant, Neil Spicer, Della Berhanu, Meenakshi Gautham, Nasir Umar and Joanna Schellenberg

An introduction to instrumental variable assumptions, validation and estimation

The instrumental variable method has been employed within economics to infer causality in the presence of unmeasured confounding. Emphasising the parallels to randomisation may increase understanding of the un...

Authors: Mette Lise Lousdal

Multiple imputation using linked proxy outcome data resulted in important bias reduction and efficiency gains: a simulation study

When an outcome variable is missing not at random (MNAR: probability of missingness depends on outcome values), estimates of the effect of an exposure on this outcome are often biased. We investigated the exte...

Authors: R. P. Cornish, J. Macleod, J. R. Carpenter and K. Tilling

Flexible semiparametric joint modeling: an application to estimate individual lung function decline and risk of pulmonary exacerbations in cystic fibrosis

Epidemiologic surveillance of lung function is key to clinical care of individuals with cystic fibrosis, but lung function decline is nonlinear and often impacted by acute respiratory events known as pulmonary...

Authors: Dan Li, Ruth Keogh, John P. Clancy and Rhonda D. Szczesniak

Spatial analysis of cluster randomised trials: a systematic review of analysis methods

Cluster randomised trials (CRTs) often use geographical areas as the unit of randomisation, however explicit consideration of the location and spatial distribution of observations is rare. In many trials, the ...

Authors: Christopher Jarvis, Gian Luca Di Tanna, Daniel Lewis, Neal Alexander and W. John Edmunds

Decision trees in epidemiological research

In many studies, it is of interest to identify population subgroups that are relatively homogeneous with respect to an outcome. The nature of these subgroups can provide insight into effect mechanisms and sugg...

Authors: Ashwini Venkatasubramaniam, Julian Wolfson, Nathan Mitchell, Timothy Barnes, Meghan JaKa and Simone French

Challenges in modeling complexity of neglected tropical diseases: a review of dynamics of visceral leishmaniasis in resource limited settings

Neglected tropical diseases (NTD), account for a large proportion of the global disease burden, and their control faces several challenges including diminishing human and financial resources for those distress...

Authors: Swati DebRoy, Olivia Prosper, Austin Mishoe and Anuj Mubayi

Randomised and non-randomised studies to estimate the effect of community-level public health interventions: definitions and methodological considerations

The preferred method to evaluate public health interventions delivered at the level of whole communities is the cluster randomised trial (CRT). The practical limitations of CRTs and the need for alternative me...

Authors: Wolf-Peter Schmidt

Model checking in multiple imputation: an overview and case study

Multiple imputation has become very popular as a general-purpose method for handling missing data. The validity of multiple-imputation-based analyses relies on the use of an appropriate model to impute the mis...

Authors: Cattram D. Nguyen, John B. Carlin and Katherine J. Lee

Causality in cancer research: a journey through models in molecular epidemiology and their philosophical interpretation

In the last decades, Systems Biology (including cancer research) has been driven by technology, statistical modelling and bioinformatics. In this paper we try to bring biological and philosophical thinking ba...

Authors: Paolo Vineis, Phyllis Illari and Federica Russo

On hazard ratio estimators by proportional hazards models in matched-pair cohort studies

In matched-pair cohort studies with censored events, the hazard ratio (HR) may be of main interest. However, it is lesser known in epidemiologic literature that the partial maximum likelihood estimator of a co...

Authors: Tomohiro Shinozaki, Mohammad Ali Mansournia and Yutaka Matsuyama

Do children with neurological disabilities use more inpatient resources: an observational study

Advances in healthcare have improved the survival of children with neurological disabilities (ND). Studies in the US have shown that children with ND use a substantial proportion of resources in children’s hos...

Authors: Jin-Xi Yuan, Marian McGowan, Irene Hadjikoumi and Buddhi Pant