Epidemiology is a discipline that focuses on the distribution and risk factors for various health events or disease outcomes. This chapter describes how epidemiology seeks to determine if a particular risk factor is likely to cause a particular health event in firefighters; the processes used to undertake case-control and cohort studies, types of epidemiological research health study designs that are typically used to determine health event causation, including specifying their advantages and disadvantages; basic epidemiological conceptsand terms; and will introduce a checklist of criteria and the process used to critically appraise and evaluate existing case-control and cohort health studies in the literature. Meta-analysis, where results from case-control and cohort studies can be combined to get an overall estimate of risk for a particular factor(s) will also be discussed, as well as its advantages and disadvantages. The chapter is intended to orient the non-technical expert to epidemiological terms, particular studies, and their value in relation to identifying factors that cause health events in firefighters.
CITATION STYLE
Lightfoot, N. E. (2016). Epidemiology. In Health Risks and Fair Compensation in the Fire Service (pp. 25–40). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23069-6_3
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