We have assembled this mini-monograph on adult lead exposure to provide guidance to clinicians and public health professionals, to summarize recent thinking on lead biomarkers and their relevance to epidemiologic research, and to review two key lead-related outcomes, namely, cardiovascular and cognitive. The lead standards of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration are woefully o...

The past five years have seen a growth in the interest in systems approaches in epidemiologic research. These approaches may be particularly appropriate for social epidemiology. Social network analysis and agent-based models (ABMs) are two approaches that have been used in the epidemiologic literature. Social network analysis involves the characterization of social networks to yield inference a...

Low maternal education is consistently associated with increased risk of preterm delivery (PTD). The interpregnancy interval (IPI), defined as the time between the date of a previous birth and the conception date of the index pregnancy, may mediate this relationship. We estimated controlled direct effects to assess whether hypothetical interventions designed to increase IPIs would reduce the ed...

The Physician Payment Review Commission has examined the potential of profiling physician practice patPR. Lee and A.B. Bindman, Institute for Healty Policy Studies, University of California, San Francisco. P.R. Lee, D.W. Shapiro and R.D. Lasker, Physician Payment Review Commission. A.B. Bindman, Division of General Internal Medicine, San Francisco General Hospital. terns within the context oi c...

Keywords sports medicine, evidence-based regression analysis, effect modifier, epidemiologic, mediation analysis

BACKGROUND Physical activity has been found to be associated with decreased risk of breast cancer in postmenopausal women in the majority of epidemiologic studies, but the association is inconsistent in premenopausal women. METHODS We studied the effect of physical activity at various ages on the incidence of breast cancer in 99,504 women from 30 to 49 years of age at enrollment in the Women'...

Epidemiology can be considered as a very old science. For example, John Graunt, a statistician, published Natural and Political Observations. In the Bills of Mortality in 1662, he analyzed the mortality rolls in London before the Great Plague, presented one of the first life tables, and reported time trends for many diseases. He provided statist...

Statistical methods for quantifying the population impact of exposure factors by means of estimating some variant of the attributable risk parameter for a binary disease variable based on stratification methods or multivariable models have been extensively developed during the last decade. In epidemiologic studies, these risk parameters enjoy growing popularityas they allow a practice-oriented ...

Salmonella Enteritidis emerged as a major egg-associated pathogen in the late 20th century. Epidemiologic data from England, Wales, and the United States indicate that S. Enteritidis filled the ecologic niche vacated by eradication of S. Gallinarum from poultry, leading to an epidemic increase in human infections. We tested this hypothesis by retrospective analysis of epidemiologic surveys in G...

Epidemiologic studies of sexually transmitted disease (STD) transmission present a number of unique challenges in design and analysis. These arise both from the social nature of STD transmission and from inherent difficulties in collecting accurate and informative data on exposure and infection. Risk of acquiring an STD depends on both individual-level factors and the behavior and infectiousnes...