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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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Increasing availability of the Internet allows using only online data collection for more epidemiological studies. We compare response patterns in a population-based health survey using two survey designs: mix...
Obtaining population-level estimates of the incidence and prevalence of dementia is challenging due to under-diagnosis and under-reporting. We investigated the feasibility of using multiple linked datasets and...
Epidemiology has contributed in many ways to identifying various risk factors for disease and to promoting population health. However, there is a continuing debate about the ability of epidemiology not only to...
There are many examples of physiological processes that follow a circadian cycle and researchers are interested in alternative methods to illustrate and quantify this diurnal variation. Circadian blood pressur...
Cluster surveys provide rapid but representative estimates of key nutrition indicators in humanitarian crises. For these surveys, an accurate estimate of the design effect is critical to calculate a sample siz...
Nutritional surveillance remains generally weak and early warning systems are needed in areas with high burden of acute under-nutrition. In order to enhance insight into nutritional surveillance, a community-b...
Electronic linkage of UK cohorts to routinely collected National Health Service (NHS) records provides virtually complete follow-up for cause-specific hospital admissions and deaths. The reliability of dementi...
Verbal autopsy (VA) is a widely used technique for assigning causes to non-medically certified deaths using information gathered from a close caregiver. Both operational and cultural factors may cause delays i...
It is well known that safe delivery in a health facility reduces the risks of maternal and infant mortality resulting from perinatal complications. What is less understood are the factors associated with safe ...
Dichotomisation of continuous data has statistical drawbacks such as loss of power but may be useful in epidemiological research to define high risk individuals.
Wasting is a major public health issue throughout the developing world. Out of the 6.9 million estimated deaths among children under five annually, over 800,000 deaths (11.6 %) are attributed to wasting. Wasti...
The issue of poor response rates to population surveys has existed for some decades, but few studies have explored methods to improve the response rate in follow-up population cohort studies.
Multivariable confounder adjustment in comparative studies of newly marketed drugs can be limited by small numbers of exposed patients and even fewer outcomes. Disease risk scores (DRSs) developed in historica...
In 1974 a joint FAO/UNICEF/WHO Expert Committee met to develop methods for nutrition surveillance. There has been much interest and activity in this topic since then, however there is a lack of guidance for pr...
The emerging burden of cardiovascular disease and diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa threatens the gains made in health by the major international effort to combat infectious diseases. There are few data on distri...
The obesity epidemic has emerged over the past few decades and is thought to be a result of both genetic and environmental factors. A newly identified factor, the gut microbiota, which is a bacterial ecosystem...
Childhood growth is a cornerstone of pediatric research. Statistical models need to consider individual trajectories to adequately describe growth outcomes. Specifically, well-defined longitudinal models are e...
The increasing availability of online maps, satellite imagery, and digital technology can ease common constraints of survey sampling in low- and middle-income countries. However, existing approaches require sp...
Epidemiological analyses of aggregated data are often used to evaluate theoretical health effects of natural disasters. Such analyses are susceptible to confounding by unmeasured differences between the expos...
Epidemiologists have debated the appropriate time-scale for cohort survival studies; chronological age or time-on-study being two such time-scales. Importantly, assessment of risk factors may depend on the cho...
A subgroup of individuals becomes entrenched in a “revolving door” involving corrections, health, and social welfare services. Little research has investigated the numbers of people that are in frequent contac...
China’s growing population of internal migrants has exceeded 236 million. Driven by rapid development and urbanization, this extreme population mobility creates opportunities for transmission of HIV and sexual...
Hantavirus infection is an emerging zoonosis transmitted by wild rodents. In Brazil, high case-fatality rates among humans infected with hantavirus are of serious concern to public health authorities. Appropri...
In 1965, Sir Austin Bradford Hill published nine “viewpoints” to help determine if observed epidemiologic associations are causal. Since then, the “Bradford Hill Criteria” have become the most frequently cited...
The importance of studying associations between socio-economic position and health has often been highlighted. Previous studies have linked the prevalence and severity of lung disease with national wealth and ...
Specialised sexually transmitted infection (STI) clinics in the Netherlands provide STI care for high-risk groups, including female sex workers (FSW), at the clinic and by outreach visiting commercial sex work...
Statistical inference is commonly said to be inapplicable to complete population studies, such as censuses, due to the absence of sampling variability. Nevertheless, in recent years, studies of whole populatio...
Sedentary behaviour (too much sitting, as distinct from too little exercise) has emerged as a potentially significant public health issue. Analytically, researchers have reported ‘independent’ associations bet...
The case definition for traumatic brain injury (TBI) often includes ‘unspecified injury to the head’ diagnostic codes. However, research has shown that the inclusion of these codes leads to false positives. As...
Disadvantages have already been pointed out on the use of odds ratio (OR) as a measure of association for designs such as cohort and cross sectional studies, for which relative risk (RR) or prevalence ratio (P...
The imposed limitations on what we can know about nature have been long recognized. Yet in the field of epidemiology a futile search for lifestyle-related risk factors for common chronic diseases continues una...
The editor of Emerging Themes in Epidemiology would like to thank all our reviewers who have contributed to the journal in Volume 11 (2014).
RotaTeq® pentavalent human rotavirus vaccine (RV5) is effective against rotavirus illness and rotavirus-related hospitalizations and death. Effectiveness depends on adherence to the dosing schedule, which incl...
Lower childhood socioeconomic position is associated with greater risk of adult obesity among women, but not men. Pregnancy-related weight changes may contribute to this gender difference. The objectives of th...
The risk of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus spreading globally is worrying, given the annual mass gathering of the Hajj and the year-long influx of pilgrims undertaking the Umrah. Based on the inc...
Uptake of family planning services in Pakistan has remained slow over the past decade despite a rapid increase in availability and awareness, indicating that social barriers may be preventing uptake. Social ba...
There is increasing evidence that childhood vaccines have effects that extend beyond their target disease. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of routine childhood vaccines on bacterial carri...
Aging societies worldwide propose a significant challenge to the model and organisation of the delivery of healthcare services. In developing countries, communicable and non-communicable diseases are affecting...
Tuberculosis is a major disease worldwide and most research focus on risk factors for adults, although there is a marked adolescent peak in incidence. The objective of this study was to identify risk factors f...
Though it has been a focus of the country’s public health surveillance systems since the 1950s, schistosomiasis represents an ongoing public health challenge in China. Parallel, schistosomiasis-specific survei...
The validity of ecological studies in epidemiology for inferring causal relationships has been widely challenged as observed associations could be biased by the Ecological Fallacy. We reconsider the important ...
In the literature, different shapes of associations have been found between body mass index (BMI) and mortality and some of the findings were opposite to each other. The association of BMI and mortality in a s...
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