Abstract
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 concepts and 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.
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Lightfoot, N.E. (2016). Epidemiology. In: Guidotti, T. (eds) Health Risks and Fair Compensation in the Fire Service. Risk, Systems and Decisions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23069-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23069-6_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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