Social epidemiology

Examples of Social epidemiology in the following topics:

• Social Epidemiology and Health

  • Social epidemiology studies the social distribution and social determinants of health.
  • Social epidemiology is defined as "the branch of epidemiology that studies the social distribution and social determinants of health"; or in other words, "both specific features of, and pathways by which, societal conditions affect health" (Krieger, 2001).
  • The roots of social epidemiology go back Emile Durkheim's work on suicide .
  • Social epidemiology may focus on individual-level measures, or on emergent social properties that have no correlation at the individual level.
  • Social epidemiology overlaps with fields in the social sciences, such as medical anthropology, medical sociology, and medical geography.

• Gender

  • The World Health Organization defines gender as socially constructed ideas about behaviors, actions, and roles characteristic of each sex.
  • The World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender as the result of socially constructed ideas about the behavior, actions, and roles characteristic of each sex.
  • Gender-related intersections and the crossing of defined gender boundaries are generally unaccounted for in socially constructed notions of gender.

• Social Class

  • Social class affects the access to healthy living conditions in particular neighborhoods.
  • Social class position, thus, affects one's access to good public health and better living environments.
  • Social determinants of health are the economic and social conditions, and their distribution among the population, that influence individual and group differences in health status.
  • Hurricane Katrina revealed many disparities in social class in the U.S.
  • Identify the various ways social class plays a role in access to and quality of health care

• Experimental Epidemiology

  • Experimental epidemiology uses an experimental model to confirm a causal relationship suggested by observational studies.
  • The identification of causal relationships between these exposures and outcomes is an important aspect of epidemiology.
  • Experimental epidemiology contains three case types: randomized control trial (often used for new medicine or drug testing), field trial (conducted on those at a high risk of conducting a disease), and community trial (research on social originating diseases) .
  • Experimental epidemiology tests a hypothesis about a disease or disease treatment in a group of people.
  • John Snow's investigative work was one of the first examples of epidemiology.

• The Science of Epidemiology

  • Epidemiological studies include disease etiology, disease surveillance and screening, biomonitoring, and clinical trials.
  • Epidemiologists rely on other scientific disciplines like biology to better understand disease processes, statistics to make efficient use of the data and draw appropriate conclusions, social sciences to better understand proximate and distal causes, and engineering for exposure assessment.
  • Experimental epidemiology contains three case types: randomized control trials (often used for new medicine or drug testing), field trials (conducted on those at a high risk of conducting a disease), and community trials (research on social originating diseases).
  • The identification of causal relationships between these exposures and outcomes is an important aspect of epidemiology.
  • A common theme in much of the epidemiological literature is that "correlation does not imply causation. " For epidemiologists, the key is in the term inference.

• History of Epidemiology

  • Epidemiology is the study of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
  • Epidemiology is the study of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
  • This was expressed by philosophers such as Plato and Rousseau, and social critics like Jonathan Swift.
  • His identification of the Broad Street pump as the cause of the Soho epidemic is considered the classic example of epidemiology.
  • Describe the key events in the development of the field of epidemiology

• Descriptive Epidemiology

  • Descriptive epidemiology focuses on describing disease distribution by characteristics relating to time, place, and people.
  • In order to accomplish this, epidemiology has two main branches: descriptive and analytical.
  • Descriptive epidemiology evaluates and catalogs all the circumstances surrounding a person affected by a health event of interest .
  • Analytical epidemiologists use data gathered by descriptive epidemiology experts to look for patterns suggesting causation.
  • The primary considerations for descriptive epidemiology are frequency and pattern.

• Analytical Epidemiology

  • Epidemiology draws statistical inferences, mostly about causes of disease in populations based on available samples of it.
  • Epidemiology is the study (or the science of the study) of the patterns, causes, and effects of health and disease conditions in defined populations.
  • Epidemiology has helped develop methodology used in clinical research, public health studies and, to some extent, basic research in the biological sciences.
  • Where descriptive epidemiology describes occurrence of disease (or of its determinants) within a population, the analytical epidemiology aims to gain knowledge on the quality and the amount of influence that determinants have on the occurrence of disease.
  • Analytical epidemiology attempts to determine the cause of an outbreak.

• The Experience of Illness

  • This may be associated with particular regions or functions of the brain or the rest of the nervous system, often in a social context.
  • Epidemiology is the scientific study of factors affecting the health and illness of individuals and populations; it serves as the foundation and logic for interventions made in the interest of public health and preventive medicine.

• Disease Severity and Duration

  • The severity and duration of diseases vary greatly and are important for epidemiological studies.
  • The International Classification of Diseases (most commonly known by the abbreviation ICD) is according to its publisher, the United Nations-sponsored World Health Organization, and is considered "the standard diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. " It is known as a health care classification system that provides codes to classify diseases and a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or disease.