Discussion 2: Epidemiologic Designs

Discussion 2: Epidemiologic Designs

Research questions:

• Is diabetes a significant issue?
• Is diabetes inherited?
• Is diabetes a physical or psychological problem?
• What are the societal, economic impacts of diabetes?

Epidemiologic study design: Descriptive Epidemiologic Research

Diabetes as a public health issue would be best studied using descriptive epidemiology. Descriptive epidemiology is a method of organizing and analyzing health and illness data to understand better how disease prevalence varies regionally and over time (Friis & Sellers, 2014). It also aids the researcher in comprehending how diabetes differs from person to person based on various personal variables (person, place, and time).

The five W’s of descriptive epidemiology are as follows according to CDC (2019).

What (diagnosis or health issue concern), who (person), where (place), when (time), why/how (causes, risk factors, modes of transmission).

Descriptive epidemiology will assist us in evaluating and cataloging all of the circumstances surrounding people who have diabetes, are obese, and are overweight (Friis & Sellers, 2014). Because descriptive epidemiology is a predecessor to analytical epidemiology, it provides data for analytic epidemiologists to seek trends that could indicate causation. The ultimate goal of both kinds of research is to reduce the occurrence of health events or diseases (such as diabetes) by better understanding the risk factors for the population’s health problem or event. We’ll be able to look at things like age, education, socioeconomic status, health-care access, race, and gender using descriptive epidemiology (Friis & Sellers, 2014). Individual evaluations may entail gathering information on shift work, eating, and exercise patterns because the study focuses on diabetes, obesity, and overweight people.

Descriptive epidemiology data sources

Descriptive epidemiology is a type of epidemiology that is used to describe the distribution of disease in a community. It specifies the features of illness incidence in terms of the person, place, and time. Secondary data sources often utilized in descriptive epidemiological investigations include population census records, patient medical records, illness registries, insurance claim forms and billing records, case literature, public health department case reports, and individual and household surveys (Friis & Sellers, 2014; Ross, n.d.).

According to Friis & Sellers (2014), assembling and evaluating data by time, place, and person is beneficial for the reason below:

• An epidemiologist can uncover disease hotspots or groups within the population. This information leads to vital hints about the causes of the public health concern, which may then be translated into research questions.

• The epidemiologist learns about the scope and trend of the public health concern under investigation, such as which months, which neighborhoods, and which populations have the most and least cases.

• You’ll carefully examine the data and get to know it so that you can identify what it can and can’t reveal based on the variables provided, its limitations, and its peculiarities.
• An epidemiologist develops a detailed account of a population’s health that can be expressed clearly using tables, graphs, and maps.

References

CDC. (2019). Principles of epidemiology. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson1/section1.html

‌ CDC. (2020, August 7). Prevalence of both diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes | diabetes. https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statistics-report/diagnosed-undiagnosed-diabetes.html

Friis, R. H., & Sellers, T. A. (2014). Epidemiology for public health practice (6th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Ross, M. M.(n.d.). Epidemiology – Sources of epidemiological data. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/epidemiology/Sources-of-epidemiological-data