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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...
In May 2014, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection, with closely related viral genomes, was diagnosed in two Dutch residents, returning from a pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, Kingdo...
Periodic or cyclic data of known periodicity are frequently encountered in epidemiological and biomedical research: for instance, seasonality provides a useful experiment of nature while diurnal rhythms play a...
Oseltamivir has been registered for use as post-exposition prophylaxis (PEP) following exposure to influenza, based on studies among healthy adults. Effectiveness among frail elderly nursing home populations s...
Men having sex with men (MSM) remain the largest high-risk group involved in on-going transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV, in the Netherlands. As risk behaviour may change with...
In many areas of clinical investigation there is great interest in identifying and validating surrogate endpoints, biomarkers that can be measured a relatively short time after a treatment has been administere...
Measures of household socio-economic position (SEP) are widely used in health research. There exist a number of approaches to their measurement, with Principal Components Analysis (PCA) applied to a basket of ...
Epidemiology and ecology share many fundamental research questions. Here we describe how principal coordinates of neighbor matrices (PCNM), a method from spatial ecology, can be applied to spatial epidemiology...
Population-based, prospective longitudinal cohort studies are considering the issues surrounding returning findings to individuals as a result of genomic and other medical research studies. While guidance is b...
The aim of this study was to provide a novel approach for estimating the incidence of renal cancer in Germany by using hospitalization data from the years 2005–2006 and to compare these estimates with incidenc...
The 21st century has seen the rise of Internet-based participatory surveillance systems for infectious diseases. These systems capture voluntarily submitted symptom data from the general public and can aggregate ...
The asset index is often used as a measure of socioeconomic status in empirical research as an explanatory variable or to control confounding. Principal component analysis (PCA) is frequently used to create th...
The study of non-atopic asthma/wheeze in children separately from atopic asthma is relatively recent. Studies have focused on single risk factors and had inconsistent findings.
It is widely accepted that influenza transmission dynamics vary by age; however methods to quantify the reproductive number by age group are limited. We introduce a simple method to estimate the reproductive n...
Maternal morbidity is more common than maternal death, and population-based estimates of the burden of maternal morbidity could provide important indicators for monitoring trends, priority setting and evaluati...
Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) surveys have become increasingly popular in global health care applications. Incorporating Bayesian ideas into LQAS survey design, such as using reasonable prior beliefs a...
Great progress has been made in mathematical models of cholera transmission dynamics in recent years. However, little impact, if any, has been made by models upon public health decision-making and day-to-day r...
Relative risk is a summary metric that is commonly used in epidemiological investigations. Increasingly, epidemiologists are using log-binomial models to study the impact of a set of predictor variables on a s...
Effective interventions require evidence on how individual causal pathways jointly determine disease. Based on the concept of systems epidemiology, this paper develops Diagram-based Analysis of Causal Systems ...
Individual-level data pooling of large population-based studies across research centres in international research projects faces many hurdles. The BioSHaRE (Biobank Standardisation and Harmonisation for Resear...
Traditional Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) designs assume observations are collected using simple random sampling. Alternatively, randomly sampling clusters of observations and then individuals within c...
An unprecedented number of nationwide tuberculosis (TB) prevalence surveys will be implemented between 2010 and 2015, to better estimate the burden of disease caused by TB and assess whether global targets for...
Undernutrition modeling makes it possible to evaluate the potential impact of such events as a food-price shock or harvest failure on the prevalence and severity of undernutrition. There are, however, uncertai...
The PROBIT methodology was presented in the 1995 World Health Organization Technical Report on Anthropometry as an alternative to the standard prevalence based method of measuring malnutrition in children. The...
Missing data often cause problems in longitudinal cohort studies with repeated follow-up waves. Research in this area has focussed on analyses with missing data in repeated measures of the outcome, from which ...
Systems for animal disease mitigation involve both surveillance activities and interventions to control the disease. They are complex organizations that are described by partial or imprecise data, making it di...
There is increasing epidemiological evidence of etiological links between general surgery and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) with long incubation periods. The purpose of this study was to identify s...
Regression modelling is one of the most widely utilized approaches in epidemiological analyses. It provides a method of identifying statistical associations, from which potential causal associations relevant t...
The volume of influenza pandemic modelling studies has increased dramatically in the last decade. Many models incorporate now sophisticated parameterization and validation techniques, economic analyses and the...
Many HIV prevalence surveys are plagued by the problem that a sizeable number of surveyed individuals do not consent to contribute blood samples for testing. One can ignore this problem, as is often done, but ...
Previous studies found an association of greater adherence to placebo medication with better outcomes. The present study tested whether this association was explained by any of the following factors: 1) adhere...
Epidemiological methods for estimating disease prevalence in humans and other animals in the absence of a gold standard diagnostic test are well established. Despite this, reporting apparent prevalence is stil...
There are few studies on the epidemiology of epilepsy in large populations in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC). Most studies in these regions use two-stage population-based screening surveys, which are t...
Infectious diseases associated with poor sanitation such as diarrhoea, intestinal worms, trachoma and lymphatic filariasis continue to cause a large disease burden in low income settings and contribute substan...
Estimation of vaccination coverage at the local level is essential to identify communities that may require additional support. Cluster surveys can be used in resource-poor settings, when population figures ar...
Various methods have been proposed for sampling when data on the population are limited. However, these methods are often biased. We propose a new method to draw a population sample using Global Positioning Sy...
The World Health Organization (WHO) collects and publishes surveillance data and statistics for select diseases, but traditional methods of gathering such data are time and labor intensive. Event-based biosurv...
Multiple imputation is becoming increasingly popular for handling missing data. However, it is often implemented without adequate consideration of whether it offers any advantage over complete case analysis fo...
There is increasing interest in using chemicals measured in carpet dust as indicators of chemical exposures. However, investigators have rarely sampled dust repeatedly from the same households and therefore li...
Methods of diagrammatic modelling have been greatly developed in the past two decades. Outside the context of infectious diseases, systematic use of diagrams in epidemiology has been mainly confined to the ana...
The aim of this study is to show how geographical information systems (GIS) can be used to track and compare hospitalization rates for traumatic brain injury (TBI) over time and across a large geographical are...
Empirical findings show that morbidity and mortality risks of migrants can differ considerably from those of populations in the host countries. However, while several explanatory models have been developed, mo...
Observational studies of human health and disease (basic, clinical and epidemiological) are vulnerable to methodological problems -such as selection bias and confounding- that make causal inferences problemati...
It is essential to use a definition that is precise and accurate for the surveillance of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and spinal cord injuries (SCI). This paper reviews the International Classification of Di...
Generalisability of longitudinal studies is threatened by issues such as choice of sampling frame, representativeness of the initial sample, and attrition. To determine representativeness, cohorts are often co...
The mechanistic interpretation of reality can be traced to the influential work by René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton. Their theories were able to accurately predict most physical phenomena relating to motion...
Arriving at a consensus between multiple clinical opinions concerning a particular case is a complex issue - and may give rise to manifestations of the democratic fallacy, whereby a majority opinion is miscons...
There are growing concerns regarding inequities in health, with poverty being an important determinant of health as well as a product of health status. Within the People's Republic of China (P.R. China), dispa...
Current conceptual frameworks on the interrelationship between armed conflict and poverty are based primarily on aggregated macro-level data and/or qualitative evidence and usually focus on adherents of warrin...
Measuring recurrent infections such as diarrhoea or respiratory infections in epidemiological studies is a methodological challenge. Problems in measuring the incidence of recurrent infections include the epis...
Emerging Themes in Epidemiology