This paper brings understanding to the ethical dimensions of human health research conducted in the context of contaminated sites. Principle-based ethical analysis, complemented with virtuous traits of character, aid in bringing clarity to recommendations for actions following research. Epidemiology is the discipline for conducting health research not only because of its methodological foundati...

Missing data are ubiquitous in clinical epidemiological research. Individuals with missing data may differ from those with no missing data in terms of the outcome of interest and prognosis in general. Missing data are often categorized into the following three types: missing completely at random (MCAR), missing at random (MAR), and missing not at random (MNAR). In clinical epidemiological resea...

Introduction When the ACS founded its intramural program of epidemiological research in 1946, lung cancer death rates in men had increased approximately 5-fold since 1930, the first year for which mortality statistics encompassed most of the United States (1). Death rates from what had been the two leading fatal cancers in women, uterine (cervix and corpus combined) and stomach cancer, were dec...

One misconception (of many) about Bayesian analyses is that prior distributions introduce assumptions that are more questionable than assumptions made by frequentist methods; yet the assumptions in priors can be more reasonable than the assumptions implicit in standard frequentist models. Another misconception is that Bayesian methods are computationally difficult and require special software. ...

Finland introduced a personal identification number system in 1964, and since then practically all administrative registers have included this unique identification code. Currently Finland has strict data protection laws, which prohibit the collection of sensitive health and social information. Health data that includes identifiers can be gathered by obtaining informed consent from the patients...

Among the many kinds of respiratory infectious diseases caused by viruses, influenza is thought to be one of the most important factors affecting human social life. Since 1980, we have continued surveillance on influenza epidemiology among children in part of a thickly inhabited area of Tokyo Metropolis, around Kamata in Ota Ward. Influenza epidemics occurred every winter in this surveillance p...

Both the incidence and the prevalence of dementia increase exponentially with increasing age. This raises the question of whether dementia is an inevitable consequence of aging or whether aging without dementia is achievable. In this review article, we sought to summarize the current evidence from epidemiological and neuropathological studies that investigated this topic. Epidemiological studie...

This text focus, on a series of author’s opinions, on the difficulties that the current system of regulation of ethics in research represents for the practice of the epidemiological research, in the Country. It introduces a few understandings concerning the present subject in the international literature, pointing out some of the most relevant themes and problems. It also examines part of the d...

Estimating the causal effect of some exposure on some outcome is the goal of many epidemiological studies. This article reviews a formal definition of causal effect for such studies. For simplicity, the main description is restricted to dichotomous variables and assumes that no random error attributable to sampling variability exists. The appendix provides a discussion of sampling variability a...

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