Applying Research to Public Health Questions: Biologically Relevant Exposures

Applying Research to Public Health Questions: Biologically Relevant Exposures

Complex diseases have both genetic and environmental components. Understanding the contribution of environmental factors to disease susceptibility will require a more comprehensive view of exposure and biological response than has traditionally been applied. " Exposure " is defined as the " contact between an agent and a target " (World Health Organization 2004). For risk assessment, this defin...

Applying Research to Public Health Questions: Timing and the Environmentally Relevant Dose

Innovative approaches in public health research: applying life course epidemiology to aboriginal health research.

A life course epidemiology approach embraces the complexity of disease risk and acknowledges the long-term effects of physical, social, psychological, and behaviour pathways, operating across an individual's life, a community's generation, and a population's development, on health and well-being. Researchers who adopt a life course epidemiology approach broaden their ability to understand, expl...

Formulating Research Questions that are Relevant to Psychotherapy

This paper argues that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has created misleading recommendations and that their interpretation by the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative is likely to inflict lasting damage on the operation and development of psychotherapy. I propose that the root of the problem lies in persevering with an inappropriate res...

Public health implications of environmental exposures.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a public health agency with responsibility for assessing the public health implications associated with uncontrolled releases of hazardous substances into the environment. The biological effects of low-level exposures are a primary concern in these assessments. One of the tools used by the agency for this purpose is the risk assess...