A recent article in the Journal by Whelton et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2013;178(7):1076-1084) prompted this commentary about the use of the word "elevated" in medical reports. We believe that the word used in that particular report should have been "higher." The exposure variable was not actually elevated according to what we understand the word to mean in epidemiologic research. Consistent with th...

Previous work has shown that multilevel modeling can be a valuable technique for epidemiologic analysis. The complexity of using this approach, however, continues to restrict its general application. A critical factor is the lack of flexible and appropriate software for multilevel modeling. SAS provides a macro, GLIMMIX, that can be used for multilevel modeling, but that is not sufficient for a...

background: it is introduced that unintentional childhood poisoning can be as result of child home environment and characteristics of parents. this study aimed at quantifying the adjusted population attributable risk percentage of risk factor of unintentional childhood poisoning.  materials and methods: the hospital based case- control included 140 consecutive poisoned children who admitted to ...

purpose: to evaluate the etiologic and epidemiologic findings in central retinal artery occlusion (crao) patients in a tertiary eye center in tehran, iran. methods: all patients with crao refered to the emergency department of farabi hospital during 2001-2002 were enrolled in the study. all patients received routine treatment and were followed for 3 months. cardiology consult was done for all p...

Substantial progress in the understanding of HIV and CD4 cell dynamics using computational models undergirded by sound epidemiologic and mathematical principles has been achieved. The early stages of the applications of these models were based on relatively simple mathematical models that considered the body as a one-compartment system. In spite of these models attractiveness due to the experim...

Findings from epidemiologic studies and research with experimental animal models provide insights into alcohol-related disease pathogeneses. Epidemiologic data indicate that heavy drinking and smoking are associated with high rates of pancreatic disease. Less clear is the association between lower levels of drinking and pancreatitis. Intriguingly, a very low percentage of drinkers develop clini...

In this commentary, structural equation models (SEMs) are discussed as a tool for epidemiologic analysis. Such models are related to and compared with other analytic approaches often used in epidemiology, including regression analysis, causal diagrams, causal mediation analysis, and marginal structural models. Several of these other approaches in fact developed out of the SEM literature. Howeve...