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What are the biases and errors that we had to know?

deezee wrote:What are the biases and errors that we had to know?

Confounding error is the one that I see the most frequently. Other than that, it usually seems to be more along the lines of "identify some potential sources of bias/error in this study" or something along those lines. Even those are very rare.

Has anyone else noticed that the "environmental" diseases include food- and water-borne diseases? It seems to be those PLUS the chemical and physical agents. It seems to be a rather broad spectrum. Do you think that those will still be heavily included, or will the focus be more on the 'purely' environmental diseases and injuries?

butter side up wrote:

deezee wrote:What are the biases and errors that we had to know?

Confounding error is the one that I see the most frequently. Other than that, it usually seems to be more along the lines of "identify some potential sources of bias/error in this study" or something along those lines. Even those are very rare.

Has anyone else noticed that the "environmental" diseases include food- and water-borne diseases? It seems to be those PLUS the chemical and physical agents. It seems to be a rather broad spectrum. Do you think that those will still be heavily included, or will the focus be more on the 'purely' environmental diseases and injuries?

That depends on the event writer. Personally, I would not use diseases that fall under the foodborne category, since that is a topic for another year. Similarly, I would not include those waterborne diseases which are heavily influenced by population density, since those fall under population growth. We had a focus on zoonoses once a while back, but since that doesn't seem to have entered the rotation I would consider those diseases fair game. This puts "natural" environmental agents such as Rickettsia, Borellia, Giardia etc. back on the table.

nice posts..........

butter side up wrote:

deezee wrote:What are the biases and errors that we had to know?

Confounding error is the one that I see the most frequently. Other than that, it usually seems to be more along the lines of "identify some potential sources of bias/error in this study" or something along those lines. Even those are very rare.

Has anyone else noticed that the "environmental" diseases include food- and water-borne diseases? It seems to be those PLUS the chemical and physical agents. It seems to be a rather broad spectrum. Do you think that those will still be heavily included, or will the focus be more on the 'purely' environmental diseases and injuries?

yeah the focus is pretty broad, but I think the majority of scenarios will involve things like carbon monoxide poisoning or sunburns and other "purely" environmental stuff, like you said.

Would a case study be similar to a case-control study? It was on our invitational test and we were kinda confused because some of the answers were clearly case-control, but it wasn't an option...

No. A case study is a study of a single case - i.e., one patient. They are usually only done on extremely interesting or unusual patients, and are only of use in epidemiology in the aggregate and for poorly understood conditions. What did you see on your test?

Flavorflav wrote:No. A case study is a study of a single case - i.e., one patient. They are usually only done on extremely interesting or unusual patients, and are only of use in epidemiology in the aggregate and for poorly understood conditions. What did you see on your test?

That's what we told the proctor, but he told us that they'll be considered the same thing in this test. The answer choices were: Double Blind, Cohort, Case Study, and Cross Sectional. On the answer key the said odds ratio was cohort. I'm positive that the answer to that was case control and that wasn't a choice. There some other blatant mistakes as well. (I'm their partner)

While I am not entirely clear what the original question was from your comments, it sounds like you are right and the answer key was wrong. Cohort studies use risk ratio or rate ratio, both generally called relative risk. Odds rataio is appropriate for case-control studies and sometimes ecological analyses.

Flavorflav wrote:No. A case study is a study of a single case - i.e., one patient. They are usually only done on extremely interesting or unusual patients, and are only of use in epidemiology in the aggregate and for poorly understood conditions. What did you see on your test?

I thought a case study was simply a broad term that encompasses cohort, case control, cross-sectional, etc.