Hygiene, epidemiology and preventive medicine

Epidemiology methods

Lectures

Development and use of epidemiological methods

Terminology used in epidemiology,basic characteristics of epidemiological studies, examples of different types of studies, their planning, design, and conducting, evaluation of results

Epidemiologic aspects of evaluation of health status

Methods of evaluation of health status, explanation of terminology used, basic characteristics of population studies, measures of disease frequency and association

Practicals

Descriptive epidemiology

Basic characteristics - person, place, time. Sources of data and its presentation.

Types of descriptive studies. Hypothesis formulation of causal association.

Analytical epidemiology

Definition, clarification of causal association between exposure and effect, hypothesis testing. Selection of study groups, statistical assesment. Prospective and retrospective case-control and cohort study, their advantages and disadvantages

Experimental epidemiology

Definition, effect and importace of experimental studies. Their types, selection of subjects under investigation, types of blinding, randomization, design, conducting and final testing and evaluation. Ethical issues of experimental clinical studies.

The ways of interpretation and evaluation of studies

Issues in analysis and interpretation of studies, evaluation of the role of bias and counfounding, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals

Evaluation of Epidemiologic studies

Issues in analysis and interpretation of studies, calculation of results of relative risk RR, odds ratio OR etc.

Validity of the diagnostic tests

Definition and importance of validity of diagnostic tests measurement, gold standard, sensitivity, specificity and predictive value calculation, design and strategy of population screening programme

All Practicals topics are illustrated by model situation solving