Methodological and conceptual issues regarding occupational psychosocial coronary heart disease epidemiology

The differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease: conceptual and methodological issues.

The study of Alzheimer's disease is hampered by insufficient knowledge of its cause. It can best be described as a syndrome whose clinical and pathological features, and their associations over time, need to be more carefully examined. Issues which impede our understanding of this syndrome include the lack of: a singular "gold standard" for its identification; longitudinal studies with appropri...

Coronary Heart Disease Epidemiology Revisited

Epidemiological research relating coronary heart disease risk to risk factors has been reviewed and condensed into simple, diagrammatic form. The predictive power of risk factors for detecting susceptibles in the population is presented. While much is now known about long-term prediction, there is an urgent need for tests to signal impending heart attacks. Against this background, the potential...

Pain in infancy: conceptual and methodological issues.

The concept of pain in infancy was explored. It was suggested that our every day usage of the term pain be applied to infants. Essentially this suggestion is that we infer that an infant has a subjective experience that is unpleasant when there is evidence of tissue damage and the infant responds with signs of distress, such as crying, increased heart rate, facial expression consistent with dis...

Behavioral phenotypes: conceptual and methodological issues.

Specific behavioral patterns associated with chromosomal and genetic disorders are being recognized more frequently. The hope is that the demonstration of a behavioral phenotype with a particular syndrome may lead to the isolation of the behavior's genetic determinants. Three issues are considered here: the problem of defining a behavioral phenotype, the difficulty of demonstrating the existenc...

Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Media Monitoring