Epidemiology

Epidemiology is the analyse as alive as analysis of a distribution who, when, together with where, patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in defined population.

It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practice by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. Epidemiologists support with explore design, collection, and statistical analysis of data, amend interpretation and dissemination of results including peer review and occasional systematic review. Epidemiology has helped introducing methodology used in clinical research, public health studies, and, to a lesser extent, basic research in the biological sciences.

Major areas of epidemiological explore increase disease causation, transmission, outbreak investigation, disease surveillance, environmental epidemiology, forensic epidemiology, occupational epidemiology, screening, biomonitoring, and comparisons of treatment effects such as in clinical trials. Epidemiologists rely on other scientific disciplines like biology to better understand disease processes, statistics to shit efficient use of the data and realize appropriate conclusions, social sciences to better understand proximate and distal causes, and engineering for exposure assessment.

Epidemiology, literally meaning "the study of what is upon the people", is derived from demos 'people, district', and epizoology" is available, and it has also been applied to studies of plant populations botanical or plant disease epidemiology.

The distinction between "epidemic" and "endemic" was number one drawn by Hippocrates, to distinguish between diseases that are "visited upon" a population epidemic from those that "reside within" a population endemic. The term "epidemiology" appears to do first been used to describe the study of epidemics in 1802 by the Spanish physician Villalba in Epidemiología Española. Epidemiologists also study the interaction of diseases in a population, a assumption known as a syndemic.

The term epidemiology is now widely applied to proceed the relation and causation of not only epidemic, infectious disease, but of disease in general, including related conditions. Some examples of topics examined through epidemiology put as high blood pressure, mental illness and obesity. Therefore, this epidemiology is based upon how the pattern of the disease causes change in the function of human beings.

Causal inference

Although epidemiology is sometimes viewed as a collection of statistical tools used to elucidate the associations of exposures to health outcomes, a deeper apprehension of this science is that of discovering causal relationships.

"Correlation does not imply causation" is a common theme for much of the epidemiological literature. For epidemiologists, the key is in the term inference. Correlation, or at least joining between two variables, is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for the infeence that one variable causes the other. Epidemiologists usage gathered data and a broad range of biomedical and psychosocial theories in an iterative way to generate or expand theory, to test hypotheses, and to make educated, informed assertions about which relationships are causal, and approximately exactly how they are causal.