Articles

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

Comparison of response patterns in different survey designs: a longitudinal panel with mixed-mode and online-only design

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...

Authors: Nicole Rübsamen, Manas K. Akmatov, Stefanie Castell, André Karch and Rafael T. Mikolajczyk

Estimating the prevalence of dementia using multiple linked administrative health records and capture–recapture methodology

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...

Authors: Michael Waller, Gita D. Mishra and Annette J. Dobson

Participatory epidemiology: the contribution of participatory research to epidemiology

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...

Authors: Mario Bach, Susanne Jordan, Susanne Hartung, Claudia Santos-Hövener and Michael T. Wright

Exploring diurnal variation using piecewise linear splines: an example using blood pressure

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...

Authors: Jamie M. Madden, Xia Li, Patricia M. Kearney, Kate Tilling and Anthony P. Fitzgerald

Parameters associated with design effect of child anthropometry indicators in small-scale field surveys

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...

Authors: Erin N. Hulland, Curtis J. Blanton, Eva Z. Leidman and Oleg O. Bilukha

Nutrition surveillance using a small open cohort: experience from Burkina Faso

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...

Authors: Mathias Altmann, Christophe Fermanian, Boshen Jiao, Chiara Altare, Martin Loada and Mark Myatt

Comparison of dementia recorded in routinely collected hospital admission data in England with dementia recorded in primary care

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...

Authors: Anna Brown, Oksana Kirichek, Angela Balkwill, Gillian Reeves, Valerie Beral, Cathie Sudlow, John Gallacher and Jane Green

Effects of recall time on cause-of-death findings using verbal autopsy: empirical evidence from rural South Africa

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...

Authors: Laith Hussain-Alkhateeb, Max Petzold, Mark Collinson, Stephen Tollman, Kathleen Kahn and Peter Byass

Assessing delivery practices of mothers over time and over space in Uganda, 2003–2012

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 ...

Authors: Daniel A. Sprague, Caroline Jeffery, Nadine Crossland, Thomas House, Gareth O. Roberts, William Vargas, Joseph Ouma, Stephen K. Lwanga and Joseph J. Valadez

A distributional approach to obtain adjusted comparisons of proportions of a population at risk

Dichotomisation of continuous data has statistical drawbacks such as loss of power but may be useful in epidemiological research to define high risk individuals.

Authors: Odile Sauzet, Jürgen Breckenkamp, Theda Borde, Silke Brenne, Matthias David, Oliver Razum and Janet L. Peacock

Is Middle-Upper Arm Circumference “normally” distributed? Secondary data analysis of 852 nutrition surveys

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...

Authors: Severine Frison, Francesco Checchi, Marko Kerac and Jennifer Nicholas

Maximising follow-up participation rates in a large scale 45 and Up Study in Australia

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.

Authors: Adrian Bauman, Philayrath Phongsavan, Alison Cowle, Emily Banks, Louisa Jorm, Kris Rogers, Bin Jalaludin and Anne Grunseit

Dimension reduction and shrinkage methods for high dimensional disease risk scores in historical data

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...

Authors: Hiraku Kumamaru, Sebastian Schneeweiss, Robert J. Glynn, Soko Setoguchi and Joshua J. Gagne

Methods of nutrition surveillance in low-income countries

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...

Authors: Veronica Tuffrey and Andrew Hall

Hypertension and diabetes in Africa: design and implementation of a large population-based study of burden and risk factors in rural and urban Malawi

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...

Authors: Amelia Catharine Crampin, Ndoliwe Kayuni, Alemayehu Amberbir, Crispin Musicha, Olivier Koole, Terence Tafatatha, Keith Branson, Jacqueline Saul, Elenaus Mwaiyeghele, Lawrence Nkhwazi, Amos Phiri, Alison Jane Price, Beatrice Mwagomba, Charles Mwansambo, Shabbar Jaffar and Moffat Joha Nyirenda

The obese gut microbiome across the epidemiologic transition

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...

Authors: Lara R. Dugas, Miles Fuller, Jack Gilbert and Brian T. Layden

Modelling subject-specific childhood growth using linear mixed-effect models with cubic regression splines

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...

Authors: Laura M. Grajeda, Andrada Ivanescu, Mayuko Saito, Ciprian Crainiceanu, Devan Jaganath, Robert H. Gilman, Jean E. Crabtree, Dermott Kelleher, Lilia Cabrera, Vitaliano Cama and William Checkley

Satellite-aided survey sampling and implementation in low- and middle-income contexts: a low-cost/low-tech alternative

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...

Authors: Marco J. Haenssgen