Epidemiology Study Designs

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Epidemiology is a major aspect of health care. Epidemiology can be defined as the study of distribution and determinants of diseases and injuries in human population (Fos & Fine, 2005). As one could imagine here are multiple ways to study epidemiology. Based on the fact that epidemiology study designs can be distinguished into two categories. These two categories are the type of outcome under study and whether there is sampling on the basis of the outcome. After this two-dimensional classification system is understood there are four study designs used for epidemiology. The four designs include incidence studies, incidence case-control studies, prevalence studies, and prevalence case-control studies (Pearce, 2012). A particular population …show more content…
Obtaining exposure information on some prevalent cases and a sample of controls selected from non-cases, may be more efficient than a complete prevalent study. This can allow for a sample from the entire source population (Pearce, 2012). After reviewing the four types of epidemiology study guides, I would choose the prevalence case-control method. I would choose this first because I favor prevalence of incidence. I favor prevalence over the incidence study because they do not require a lengthy follow up. A lengthy follow up can suck up many resources. Some diseases like asthma are difficult to measure without this intensive follow up in incidence studies (Pearce, 2012). It is much more practical to use a prevalence method over an incidence method whenever …show more content…
A prevalence case-control study has the ability to yield the same results as a prevalence study in a more efficient manner. Sometimes information on exposure can be costly or timely to obtain. This is a time it may be more efficient to use a prevalence case-control study guide over a prevalence study guide (Pearce, 2012). When researching and studying diseases, it is my opinion that cost should be cut whenever possible. We want to get the most accurate results possible but without using an excess of money and resources. There are many diseases present in the world today and it would be beneficial to all if more diseases could be researched. In 2007 there was a study published by the British Journal of Dermatology. This was a prevalence case-control study. It was a study of metabolic syndrome in patients with psoriasis. Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin disease. This study was on hospital patients. Of these patients in the study 338 were psoriatic patients and 334 were control. This study used prevalence case-control by using samples of patients from both cases and controls. The study tried to account for the age difference in the study by adding an extra calculation (Gisondi, et al.,