Epidemiology plays an all-important role in many areas of medicine, from discovering the relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, to documenting the impact of diet, the environment, and exercise on general health, to tracking the origin and spread of new epidemics such as SwineFlu. It is truly a vital field, central to the health of society, but it is often poorly understood, largely due to misrepresentations in the media. In this Very Short Introduction, an in...

Teaching epidemiology requires skill and knowledge, combined with a clear teaching strategy and good pedagogic skills. The general advice is simple: if you are not an expert on a topic, try to enrich your background knowledge before you start teaching. The new edition of Teaching Epidemiology helps you to do this and, by providing world-expert teachers' advice on how best to structure teaching, providing a unique insight into what has worked in their hands. This book will help you...

What is epidemiology? What are the causes of a new disease? How can pandemics be prevented? Epidemiology is the study of the changing patterns of disease and its main aim is to improve the health of populations. It's a vital field, central to the health of society, to the identification of causes of disease, and to their management and prevention. Epidemiology has had an impact on many areas of medicine; from discovering the relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, to the orig...

The second edition of this internationally acclaimed title is the ideal handbook for those involved in conducting epidemiological research. The objective of most epidemiological studies is to relate exposure to putative causal agents to the occurrence of a particular disease. The achievement of this objective depends critically on accurate measurement of exposure. This book reviews principles and techniques that can be applied to measuring a wide range of exposures, including demographic, ...

Since publication of the first three editions of this hugely successful book, systematic methods of critical appraisal have been accepted as central to healthcare provision, both in critical applications and in a wider health services and community perspective. This new edition builds on the work of the previous editions by presenting a fully updated and accessible system of critical appraisal applicable to clinical, epidemiological, and public health studies, and related fields. The book ...

Translating the evidence from the bedside to populationsThis sixth edition of the best-selling Epidemiology, Evidence-based Medicine and Public Health Lecture Notes equips students and health professionals with the basic tools required to learn, practice and teach epidemiology and health prevention in a contemporary setting.The first section, 'Epidemiology', introduces the fundamental principles and scientific basis behind work to improve the healt...

Bias analysis quantifies the influence of systematic error on an epidemiology study’s estimate of association. The fundamental methods of bias analysis in epi- miology have been well described for decades, yet are seldom applied in published presentations of epidemiologic research. More recent advances in bias analysis, such as probabilistic bias analysis, appear even more rarely. We suspect that there are both supply-side and demand-side explanations for the scarcity of bias analysis. On ...

The Strategy of Preventive Medicine, by Geoffrey Rose, first published in 1993 remains a key text for anyone involved in preventive medicine. Rose's insights into the inextricable relationship between ill health, or deviance, in individuals and populations they come from, have transformed our whole approach to strategies for improving health. His personal and unique book, based on many years research, sets out the case that the essential determinants of the health of society are to be foun...

For many complaints and conditions, the benefits from surgery are lower, and the risks higher, than you or your surgeon think. In this book you will see how commonly performed operations can be found to be useless or even harmful when properly evaluated. That these claims come from an experienced, practising orthopaedic surgeon who performs many of these operations himself, makes the unsettling argument particularly compelling.Of course no surgeon is recommending invasive surgery i...

How to Read a Paper describes the different types of clinical research reporting, and explains how to critically appraise the publications. The book provides the tools to find and evaluate the literature, and implement the findings in an evidence-based, patient-centered way. Written for anyone in the health care professions who has little or no knowledge of evidence-based medicine, it provides a clear understanding of the concepts and how to put them into practice at the basic, cl...

The success of the Apgar score demonstrates the astounding power of an appropriate clinical instrument. This down-to-earth book provides practical advice, underpinned by theoretical principles, on developing and evaluating measurement instruments in all fields of medicine. It equips you to choose the most appropriate instrument for specific purposes. The book covers measurement theories, methods and criteria for evaluating and selecting instruments. It provides methods to assess measuremen...

For those fortunate enough to reside in the developed world, death before reaching a ripe old age is a tragedy, not a fact of life. Although aging and dying are not diseases, older Americans are subject to the most egregious marketing in the name of “successful aging” and “long life,” as if both are commodities. In Rethinking Aging, Nortin M. Hadler examines health-care choices offered to aging Americans and argues that too often the choices serve to profit the provider rather tha...