Epidemiology What is Causality? What is Confounding

1.     What is the difference between Descriptive and Analytic epidemiology?

 

Descriptive – using epidemiology to describe the distribution of disease and or determinants

Analytic- using epidemiology to study  the etiology of disease

 etiology is the cause or set of causes of disease

 

 

1.     Which of the following is not a supernatural explanation for disease causality?

Miasma

1.     What are the two types of Causal Models discussed in this lecture?

a.     Deterministic and Probabilistic

Deterministic

Cause and effect

Probabilistic

Statistics

1.     What is the difference between a Necessary cause and a Sufficient cause?

 

Necessary cause- An expose whose presence is required for the occurrence of the outcome

Sufficient cause- an exposure whose presence by itself can produce the outcome

A Necessary and Sufficient cause of disease will:

  Produce the disease by itself

  Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. The carcinogens in tobacco smoke are considered:

Sufficient by not Necessary: While they can cause lung cancer, other exposures can also cause lung cancer

In Rothman’s Causal Pie “component causes” work together to form a sufficient cause of disease. However, one of the causes is ______________.

Necessary for the disease to occur

   In 1965 he published his criteria for causation, which are a set of guidelines or considerations that are useful when evaluating possible causal relationships between an exposure and an outcome?

Austin Bradford Hill

  Which of Hill’s criteria are considered necessary for a causal relationship to exist between an exposure and an outcome?

Temporality the exposure must precede tone outcome

Plausibility- they must be a biological mechanism that links the exposure to the outcome (ina c causal relationship)

 

 

What three criteria are necessary for a variable to be considered a confounder?

Exposure, outcome, and confounder

A variable that is associated with the outcome, a variable that is also associated with the exposure, and a variable that is not a result of the exposure

It is impossible to find every confounder in an observational study

Fundamentally, epidemiology is designed to easily identify the exact biological mechanism behind disease causation

alse: Analytic epidemiology finds “risk factors”, associated with disease. This is typically not the same thing as finding the exact biological mechanisms that cause disease