Disease Detectives

[sk8lynne]

yeah i have but i really don't remember the topics. At my regional they asked randomly "Who wrote this case." The answer was John Snow , but at the time we didn't know about him. I thought this and when they asked, "What year was this outbreak?" was really random.

[doctor]

i had a question which was like who invented the rabies vaccine?
and we're like ??????????
to ace disease detectives just memorize formulas and vocab and be able to do all of the cases in 50 mins

[genius3point14159]

yeah they tend to ask the vaccine questions a lot...


by the way does anybody have a good simple definition for
- analytical study
- descriptive study
- attack rate

thanks soo much cause websites always have definitions that have so many long words and.. they just confuse me like crazy...

[Flavorflav]

Now how exactly can you tell teh difference between a case-control and a cohort study?

A case-control study is trying to find the cause/effect of something.

No offense, but this is really misleading. Case-control studies (like cohort studies) are incapable of showing cause and effect - they can only show correlations. It is true that they may be used to narrow down the field of possible causes, but only a randomized clinical trial can allow you to draw conclusions about cause and effect. This is because only in the RCT do you control other confounding variables. The case-control study probably is the most widely used, because it is the quickest and cheapest. Basically, you take a number of people with the illness (or other factor) you are interested in, and then compare them with a set of controls who do not have the illness (or other factor). The whole study is done in a short amount of time - you may interview people about their history, but you do not follow them over time. In a cohort study, you do follow people over time - usually prospectively, which means you follow them from the beginning of the study for some number of years. You can also do a retrospective cohort study, however - say, by tracking down all the medical info for people who graduated from your high school in 2000 or something. The key point is that you take a defined group and follow them over time, while in a case-control study you don't. The other difference is that, while you can't attribute causality from either study, cohort studies do allow you to compare risk while case-control studies do not.
To take an example, let's say you wanted to study smoking and cancer. To do a case-control study, you would take a bunch of cancer patients and interview them about smoking, and do the same for some group of other people who do not have cancer. You could calculate the odds that cancer patients were smokers and divide it by the odds that noncancer patients were smokers (odds ratio), but you can't do a relative risk because you don't know what proportion of the whole population has cancer, at least not from this study. To do a cohort study, you would selest a group of people (say, this year's graduating class) and follow them for, say, twenty years and see how many got cancer and whether or not they smoked. You can do relative risk because you can get the rate of cancer for the whole group. No matter what you find, you cannot assume that smoking causes cancer. Theoretically, it would be possible that cancer makes people smoke or that some types of people are both more likely to smoke and more likely to get cancer.

[bassoonerorlater1]

What are temporal patterns and how do i study them? The training handout says to know about them, but doesn't explain them.

[sadistic_cottoncandy]

yeah, we had to look them up, and even then we didn't find a good def, so we just made one up based on other definitions (like temporality or whatever). i don't know if it's right, but what we came up with is that temporal patterns are sort of like clusters, only they have more to do with the time, rather than time and location.
luckily, we haven't had any questions about temporal patterns on any of our tests.

[bassoonerorlater1]

Thank You!!!

[scigeek95]

Ya'll don't really study?!?! I've been reading some of these replies and I'm surprised! We have a 1 hour practice every week, and even then it's sometimes not enough! We go in depth over different diseases, studies... Though we only made 8th at state

[srsvball95]

Wow- a few weeks before competition, we practice everyday after school from 2:35-5 or even later. If we don't have a competition soon, then we practice a few days every week. but then again, we practice at school, and we are with everyone else, so it's a different environment than if you would practice at home (Which i still did) Yet, and very unfortunately (I am furious about this) we got 16th at state in Disease Detectives
I have no idea how that happened- i guess i just need to practice MUCH more on that. But i got 2nd in it at regionals....

[denmarksoccer]

Ya'll don't really study?!?! I've been reading some of these replies and I'm surprised! We have a 1 hour practice every week, and even then it's sometimes not enough! We go in depth over different diseases, studies... Though we only made 8th at state

But the event doesn't require a lot of studying, it requires a lot of reading and analyzing information. That's why it is much better to learn everything in the first couple of months, and then just test, test, test.