Essential Epidemiology

Penny Webb is a Senior Research Fellow and Head, Gynaecological Cancers Group, Queensland Institute of Medical Research, Brisbane, Australia. Chris Bain is Reader in Epidemiology, School of Population Health, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

1. Epidemiology is …; 2. How long is a piece of string? Measuring disease frequency; 3. Who, what, where and when? Descriptive epidemiology; 4. Healthy research: study designs for public health; 5. Why? Linking exposure and disease; 6. Heads or tails?: The role of chance; 7. All that glitters is not gold: the problem of error; 8. Muddied waters: the challenge of confounding; 9. Reading between the lines: reading and writing epidemiological papers; 10. Who sank the boat? Association and causation; 11. Assembling the building blocks: reviews and their uses; 12. Outbreaks, epidemics and clusters; 13. Watching not waiting: surveillance and epidemiological intelligence; 14. Prevention: better than cure?; 15. Early detection: what benefits at what cost?; 16. A final word …; Answers to questions; Appendix 1. Direct standardisation; Appendix 2. Standard populations; Appendix 3. Calculating cumulative incidence and lifetime risk from routine data; Appendix 4. Indirect standardisation; Appendix 5. Calculating life expectancy from a life table; Appendix 6. The Mantel–Haenszel method for calculating pooled odds ratios; Appendix 7. Formulae for calculating confidence intervals for common epidemiological measures; Index.