Epidemiology Final Exam Review
The big ideas you need to have a grasp of (The 5 Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings):
Essential Questions / Enduring Understandings1 / How is this disease distributed and what hypotheses might explain that distribution? / Health-related conditions and behaviors are not distributed uniformly in a population. Each has a unique descriptive epidemiology that can be discovered by identifying how it is distributed in a population in terms of person, place, and time. Descriptive epidemiology provides clues for formulating hypotheses.
2 / Is there an association between the hypothesized cause and the disease? / Causal hypotheses can be tested by observing exposures and diseases of people as they go about their daily lives. Information from these observational studies can be used to make and compare rates and identify associations.
3 / Is this association causal? / Causation is only one explanation for finding an association between an exposure and a disease. Because observational studies are flawed, other explanations must also be considered.
4 / What should be done when preventable causes of disease are found? / When a causal association has been identified, decisions about possible disease prevention strategies are based on more than the scientific evidence. Given competing values, social, economic, and political factors must also be considered.
5 / Did the disease prevention strategy work? / The effectiveness of a prevention strategy can be evaluated by making and comparing rates of disease in populations of people who were and were not exposed to the strategy. Costs, trade-offs and alternative strategies must also be considered.
Some Specifics:
Outbreak investigation (John Snow style)
Disease distribution (person, place, time)
Prevalence/Incidence
How to calculate attack rate
Case definition
Creating a 2x2 table
Calculating and interpreting relative risk
Study designs (controlled trial, cohort, case-control, cross sectional)
Explanations for an association (cause, chance, confounding, time order confusion, bias)
Calculating and interpreting odds ratio
Risk management strategies
The immune system
Infectious disease
Cancer
What challenges do public health advocates face in reducing risk among a population? How do actual data, risk perception, and risk acceptance affect the creation, implementation, and success of a public health policy?
*As we did not test on Immunity, Infectious Disease, and Cancer, expect to see this addressed more heavily on the test.
Use your old tests and quizzes to study the math problems.
Expect to see one essay question adapted from each of the 2 tests you’ve had.
Largely, this exam will measure the knowledge and understanding you’ve accumulated over the past 5 months, rather than the facts you’ve filed away. Example: instead of having a vocabulary section, I expect you to use appropriate vocabulary in your responses. Your ability to use the vocabulary in proper context shows me that you understand it in a more meaningful way than a definition matching test. If you are able to think like an epidemiologist, you will do well.