2019/2020

2019/2020

DM270

MED/01 (MEDICAL STATISTICS)

DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH, NEUROSCIENCE, EXPERIMENTAL AND FORENSIC MEDICINE

ENVIRONMENT AND WORKPLACE PREVENTION TECHNIQUES

PERCORSO COMUNE

1°

2nd semester (02/03/2020 - 12/06/2020)

2

16 lesson hours

Italian

WRITTEN TEST

MONTI MARIA CRISTINA - 2 ECTS

The course is part of the students' basic training, together with Physics and Medical Statistics, preparatory to the lessons and activities in the Prevention field. No particular prerequisites need to follow the course. On the contrary is mandatory for Prevention principles, Health Surveillance, Research Methodology.

The course aims to provide the student with the tools necessary to:
- know and understand the causal relationship between exposure and outcome
- identify the study design useful to answer questions in the field of Prevention and apply it
- calculate, understand and interpret the most important epidemiological measures of disease and association between exposure and disease.
At the end of the course the student will be able to autonomously carry out the planning of basic epidemiological research and communicate in a pertinent way as well as emerged, as well as understand the published evidence and be able to critically evaluate what exists in relation to their work context.

- Introduction to epidemiology: definition of epidemiology, historical outline.
- The causation in epidemiology.
- Types of studies: observational and experimental studies.
- The main experimental studies design: randomized control trials, fields trials, community trials.
- Observational studies: descriptive studies,
Ecological studies, cross-sectional studies, , case-control studies, cohort studies: characteristics, advantages and disadvantages.
- Confounding and effect modifier.
- Main epidemiological measures of disease frequency: prevalence, cumulative risk or incidence, incidence rate, crude and standardized mortality rate, lethality rate. Odds of exposure and disease.
- Association measures: absolute and relative measures. Absolute measures: Absolute risk, Risk attributable to exposure and Risk attributable to the population. Relative Measures: Prevalence Ratio, Relative Risk or Risk Ratio, Incidence Ratio Rates, Odds Ratio. Standardized Mortality Ratio or SMR.
- Outlines on available information (health flows: death and birth records, notification of infectious diseases, hospital sources, pathology registries) as sources of data for epidemiological studies.

The course is organized in lectures and additional practical activities. Environmental and Occupational Epidemiology seminars can also be proposed to complete the lectures.

Basic Epidemiology. Robert Beaglehole,Ruth Bonita,Tord Kjellstrom
A short presentation of academicals lectures will be on Kiro platform.

The examination will be written with a problem solving approach. The student will have to face some research questions, attesting to have acquired both the ability to manage the study design, to apply the epidemiological measures necessary to produce estimates of illness and epidemiological association (knowledge and skills) and to interpret the results obtained (competence).

The Professor takes appointments (Dept. of Public Health, Experimental and Forensic Medicine, U.O. of Biostatistics and Clinical Epidemiology, Via Forlanini 2, e-mail: svillani@unipv.it), usually on Tuesday.