Competing events can preclude the event of interest from occurring in epidemiologic data and can be analyzed by using extensions of survival analysis methods. In this paper, the authors outline 3 regression approaches for estimating 2 key quantities in competing risks analysis: the cause-specific relative hazard (csRH) and the subdistribution relative hazard (sdRH). They compare and contrast th...

background: periodic epidemiological studies are necessary to understand the pattern of poisoning in each region. this study was designed to evaluate the pattern of acute poisoning cases treated in a tertiary care hospital in navi mumbai, india. methods: this cross sectional study was conducted at dr. d. y. patil medical college, hospital and research centre during july 2012 to july 2013. all c...

Recent epidemiologic research has shown that people with higher socioeconomic status (SES) (e.g., educational attainment) have better psychological health than those with lower SES. However, the psychosocial mechanisms of underlying this relationship remain unclear. To fill this gap, the current study examines the mediating effects of job demands and job resources in the relationship between ed...

Using contextual factors beyond individual factors, contextual analysis allows a more accurate identification of at-risk populations, which could be useful when planning health programs. Multilevel models, widely used in British and North-American social epidemiology research but less frequently in France, are particularly suitable to analyse contextual data, because they take into account thei...

The analysis of routinely collected surveillance data is an important challenge in public health practice. We present a method based on a hidden Markov model for monitoring such time series. The model characterizes the sequence of measurements by assuming that its probability density function depends on the state of an underlying Markov chain. The parameter vector includes distribution paramete...

Dr. VanderWeele has provided an insightful commentary (1) on our article (2) on the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) as a tool for epidemiologic analysis. In his commentary, he illustrates the degree to which strong assumptions are made when conducting SEM analyses. For example, as described for regression analysis, linearity assumptions are made across all relations with the outcome v...

Social class standardisation has been proposed as a method for separating the effects of occupation and "social" or "lifestyle" factors in epidemiological studies, by comparing workers in a particular occupation with other workers in the same social class. The validity of this method rests upon two assumptions: (1) that social factors have the same effect in all occupational groups in the same ...

BACKGROUND Dogs are popular pets in many countries. Identifying differences between those who own dogs or have contact with dogs, and those who do not, is useful to those interested in the human-animal bond, human health and for provision of veterinary services. This census-based, epidemiological study aimed to investigate factors associated with dog ownership and contact with dogs, in a semi-r...