All clinical research regardless if classified as patient-oriented, translational, epidemiologic, comparative effectiveness, behavioral, outcomes, or health services research has individual human beings or groups of human beings as its unit of observation. As such, principles of epidemiology serve as the basic scientific methodology of all clinical research.
The objectives of this course are to provide a detailed understanding of the basic principles of epidemiology including:
- diverse array of study designs, and their theoretical interrelatedness, available in clinical and epidemiologic research;
- importance of measurement;
- different types of measures of disease occurrence;
- methods to measure risk factor ("exposure") - disease ("outcome") association;
- measures of attributable risk;
- interaction;
- approaches to identify and minimize selection, measurement and confounding bias; and
- conceptual motivation for more sophisticated methods (e.g., regression or marginal structural approaches) to manage confounding, which are increasingly common tools in epidemiologic analyses.