How is epidemiology fundamental to the practice of public health?
Whereas epidemiology is the study of disease occurrence and transmission in a human population, epidemiological studies focus on the distribution and determinants of disease. Epidemiology may also be considered the method of public health—a scientific approach to studying disease and health problems.
Why is epidemiology important to public health?
It is the scientific method of investigation problem-solving used by disease detectives— epidemiologists, laboratory scientists, statisticians, physicians and other health care providers, and public health professionals—to get to the root of health problems and outbreaks in a community.
What is descriptive epidemiology and why is it important for public health?
Descriptive epidemiology provides a way of organizing and analyzing data on health and disease in order to understand variations in disease frequency geographically and over time and how disease varies among people based on a host of personal characteristics (person, place, and time).
How does an epidemiologist describe the burden of disease?
Disease burden is the impact of a health problem as measured by financial cost, mortality, morbidity, or other indicators. It is often quantified in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) or disability-adjusted life years (DALYs).
What does DALYs mean?
The overall burden of disease is assessed using the disability-adjusted life year (DALY), a time-based measure that combines years of life lost due to premature mortality (YLLs) and years of life lost due to time lived in states of less than full health, or years of healthy life lost due to disability (YLDs).
Why is Burden of Disease important?
It is an important summary measure for health policy and planning because it quantifies the total impact of health conditions on the individual at the population level, in a comparable and consistent way.
Why is it important to study disease burden?
Why is it important to estimate burden of disease? Scientific evidence is key to improving global public health, because national and international health policies should be based on accurate and meaningful health information.
What are the essential elements of a burden of disease assessment?
Features of the GBD framework include the incorporation of data on nonfatal health outcomes into summary measures of population health, the development of methods for assessing the reliability of data and imputing missing data, and the use of a common metric to summarize the disease burden from diagnostic categories of …
What is the leading cause of burden of disease?
What are the leading causes of burden? The disease groups causing the most burden (DALY) in 2015 were cancer (18% of the total burden), cardiovascular diseases (14%), musculoskeletal conditions (13%), mental & substance use disorders (12%) and injuries (8.5%) (Figure 1).
What is the meaning of disease burden?
Disease burden is the impact of a health problem on a given population, and can be measured using a variety of indicators such as mortality, morbidity or financial cost.
What is meant by health status?
Health status is an individual’s relative level of wellness and illness, taking into account the presence of biological or physiological dysfunction, symptoms, and functional impairment.
How do we measure disease?
There are two related measures that are used in this regard: incidence proportion (cumulative incidence) and incidence rate. A useful way to think about cumulative incidence (incidence proportion) is that it is the probability of developing disease over a stated period of time; as such, it is an estimate of risk.
What is an indicator of the global burden of disease?
A GBD study aims to quantify the burden of premature mortality and disability for major diseases or disease groups, and uses a summary measure of population health, the DALY, to combine estimates of the years of life lost and years lived with disabilities. The data are also broken down by age, sex and region.
Which two conditions are among the top three causes of death globally?
The top global causes of death, in order of total number of lives lost, are associated with three broad topics: cardiovascular (ischaemic heart disease, stroke), respiratory (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lower respiratory infections) and neonatal conditions – which include birth asphyxia and birth trauma.
What is global burden of disease analyze any three main factors responsible for it?
In 2013, the six most important risk factors for disease burden globally were dietary risks, high systolic blood pressure, child and maternal malnutrition, tobacco, air pollution, and high body mass index (a measure of body fat). This set of risks reflects a general shift toward behavioral and metabolic risks.
What are the three main purposes of population health measurement?
Three approaches to measuring population health outcomes are available: 1) aggregating health outcome measurements made on people into summary statistics, such as population averages or medians; 2) assessing the distribution of individual health outcome measures in a population and among specific population subgroups; …