Epi Test and Quiz Questions – Flashcards
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Epidemiology is the study of the distribution of disease, risk factors and disease-related exposures and health status in populations, as well as the study of _______ of those distributions
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determinants
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T or F: An epidemic occurs when there are significantly more cases of the same disease than past experience would have predicted.
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True
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What are the Belmont Principles?
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Respect for Persons, Justice, and Beneficence
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What is not included in the Ethics Guide for Public health?
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Disseminate results of public health actions
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T or F: Koch's postulates were developed to answer the question of whether cigarettes cause disease, especially lung cancer.
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False
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Who is the father of modern vital statistics?
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William Farr
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T or F: Hill's causal criteria are one of several methods for assessing causality.
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True
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Which one of Hill's causal criteria is supported by this statement, "This finding is in keeping with results reported from similar studies by Smith et al. in 2000 and Jones et al. in 2005."?
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Consistency
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T or F: Failure of Hill's causal criterion for temporality disproves a causal relationship
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True
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Which one of Hill's causal criteria is supported by this statement, "This study was able to establish that students ate at the Blue Grass Festival prior to getting E. Coli."?
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Temporality
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T or F: Clinical Ethics and Public health ethics both focus on population, institutions and communities
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False
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T or F: Analytic epidemiology is used to measure the distribution or patterns of disease in the population by person, place, and time
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False
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T or F: Descriptive epidemiology data may be used to help researchers form hypotheses that can be tested using analytic epidemiology
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True
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T or F: The following statement is an example of incident cases of disease. "206, 640 men in the United States were diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2009."
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True
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T or F: The following statement is an example of incident cases of disease. "2,500 patients were asked to complete a health questionnaire during their annual physical. 198 patients reported having asthma."
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False
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A treatment is developed that prolongs the life of those suffering from the disease has what effect on prevalence
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increases prevalence
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A new measure is developed that prevents new cases of disease from occurring has what effect on prevalence?
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No effect on prevalence
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There is immigration of a large number of healthy people into the population, what effect does this have on prevalence?
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Decreases prevalence
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T or F: Unlike many other observational epidemiologic studies, case-control studies start by selecting people who are either cases or controls and looking back in time to determine a prior exposure status.
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True
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What technique used in experimental studies can be applied to cohort studies?
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Randomization
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What is not an advantage of ecologic studies?
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Allow us to determine individual risk factors from group-level data
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If an exposure has no association with a certain outcome, what value would you obtain for the risk ratio?
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1
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T or F: A risk ratio of 6.2 indicates that the odds of getting a particular health outcome among the exposed group is 6.2 times that of getting the outcome among the unexposed group.
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false
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T or F: In cross-sectional studies, the exposure and outcome status are assessed at the same time
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True
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T or F: Compared to other observational studies, cohort studies are typically less expensive
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False
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T or F: Cohort studies are used to measure incident cases of disease.
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True
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T or F: In a case-control study, the controls should represent the source population from which the cases arise.
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True
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T or F: A placebo is an inactive substance given to the comparison group as a substitute for an active substance, especially when the person is not informed of whether they are being given an active or inactive substance.
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True
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T or F: Case control studies can be used to directly measure odds ratio, risk ratios, and rate ratios.
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False
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Which one of Hill's causal criteria is supported by this statement, "Many epidemiological studies conducted in the US and abroad have also found that a high body mass index increases the risk of cancer mortality."
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Consistency
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T or F: Informed consent is a necessary part of research on human subjects. See the IRB readings for more information.
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True
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John Snow is called the father of modern epidemiology because
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He was the first to use epidemiology by recognizing a natural experiment was occurring.
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T or F: Failure of any one of Hill's causal criteria disproves a causal relationship.
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False
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T or F: Hill's causal criteria are the "gold standard" for assessing causality in epidemiology
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True
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What basic public health principles were violated in the Tuskegee Syphilis study?
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Do no harm, autonomy, fair distribution of burden and benefits
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T or F: There are predictable patterns of the occurrence of health and disease in populations
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True
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Which one of Hill's causal criteria is supported by this statement, "This study found that prostate cancer mortality increased as coffee consumption increased. Compared to men who drank no coffee, the risk ratios among men who drank 1 cup of coffee per day, 2-3 cups of coffee per day, and 4 or more cups of coffee per day were 1.1, 1.2, and 1.4, respectively."
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Biological gradient
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Which one of Hill's causal criteria is supported by this statement, "In this study, television viewing was measured 2 years before smoking initiation."?
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Temporality
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Which of the following are not always considered a protected population for research on human subjects?
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The elderly
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T or F: Epidemiologic data can be used to directly develop policy and influence population health.
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True
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T or F: Epidemiology is the study of the distribution of disease, risk factors and disease-related exposures, and health status in populations, as well as the study of the determinants of those distributions.
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True
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T or F: If the safety of the public is in danger, public health officials have the authority to quarantine or isolate individuals who may be contagious.
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True
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T or F: Epidemiology is a multidisciplinary field that evolved from the branch of medical science that treats epidemics.
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True
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T or F: Which one of Hill's causal criteria is supported by this statement, "One of the strengths of this study is that the condition of being overweight was established before cancer developed."?
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Temporality
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T or F: Public health ethics are based on medical ethics, just at the population level. Select one:
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False
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In reviewing an epidemiologic study, where would you look to find the variables and measures?
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Methods
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In reviewing an epidemiologic study, where would you look to find the study design and population?
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Methods
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T or F: Population growth is the net migration in a population (immigrants - emigrants) minus the natural increase in a population (births - deaths).
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False
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T or F: Distal risk factors can cause proximal risk factors of disease.
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True
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The biomedical perspective is the study of all of the following, EXCEPT:
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Environmental factors. It looks as mechanisms of disease, proximate causes-directly related to disease onset, and individual risk factors
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We use descriptive epidemiology to answer which of the following questions about the patterns of disease in populations?
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Who has the disease, where does the disease occur, and when does the disease occur?
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T or F: People become diseased only through biomedical risk factors.
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False
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T or F: Public health interventions typically focus on biomedical causes of disease.
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False
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T or F: The following statement is an example of incident cases of disease. "In 2009, there were 206,640 men in the United States living with prostate cancer."
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False
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A _____ is a way to describe who has the health-related state by identifying what happened, where it happened, and when it happened.
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Case definition
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Before the isolation of insulin, people with Type 1 Diabetes usually lived less than 1 year from the onset of disease. After the introduction of insulin into medical practice, what happened to the incidence of type 1 diabetes?
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Nothing
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T or F: Descriptive epidemiology is important because it helps form hypotheses that can be tested using analytic epidemiology.
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True
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Identify the study design: Your company has developed a new vaccine for pertussis (a.k.a. whooping cough). To test its effectiveness, 1000 healthy children were randomized to receive either the new vaccine (500 children) or the old vaccine (500 children). The children were followed for two years to monitor the risk of pertussis.
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Randomized Control Trial
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Identify the study design: A study that compares the current prevalence of high blood pressure among highway department toll booth collectors with the current prevalence of high blood pressure of highway department office workers.
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Cross-sectional study
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T or F: Randomized control trials are the "gold standard" study design in public health research because they can be used for virtually any study question.
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False
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What are the three types of experimental study designs?
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Randomized Control Trial, Structural Intervention and Crossover clinical trial
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What should case control studies be used for?
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rare outcomes
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What should cohort studies be used for?
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rare exposures
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True or False. Prospective cohort studies start after cases occur, and research look back in time to ascertain previous exposure status.
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False
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True or False. Cohort studies measure incident cases of disease.
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True
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True or False. Compared to other observational studies, cohort studies are typically less expensive.
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False
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In epidemiology research, If the relative risk or the risk ratio is greater than 1.0, the group with the suspected risk factor (exposure):
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has a higher risk of the disorder
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T or F: In a cohort study examining exposure to texting while driving with an outcome of a car accident, an odds ratio of 2.3 can be interpreted as follows: the odds of getting into a car accident among those who text and drive is 2.3 times than that of those who do not text and drive.
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False
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An epidemic curve illustrates which of the following questions of disease distribution?
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When
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T or F: Confounding cannot be controlled for at the analysis level through stratification or multiple regression analysis
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False
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T or F: Confounding is a type of bias.
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True
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True or false. Non-communicable diseases and toxins can't be the cause of an outbreak (though they can cause an epidemic).
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False
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Berkson's bias- where study participants are sampled from a hospital setting instead of the general population - is a type of:
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Selection Bias
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Loss to follow-up bias is an important concern in which type of epidemiologic study?
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Cohort and Experimental Studies
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When epidemiologists are called to investigate an outbreak of an infectious disease, what is the first thing they must do?
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Agree on a case definition
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Which of the following study designs has the most opportunity for selection bias?
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Case-control
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True or False. Bias occurs when there is a systematic error in an epidemiologic study that affects our estimate of the relationship between the exposure and outcome of interest.
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True
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True or false. Tobacco control policies and interventions are created based on epidemiologic data.
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True
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Recall bias- where cases remember and report more about past exposures compared to controls- is a type of:
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Information Bias
