Course Epidemiology I - Basic Principles of Epidemiology

The course C155/31 Epidemiology I - Basic Principles of Epidemiology is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, spring 2024.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Requirements for participation: None

Aim: To teach basic epidemiologic study designs, measures of occurrence and association and interpretation and inference. Please see teaching objectives for details.

Learning outcomes: By the end of the course the student should be able to:

• Define epidemiologic measures of occurrence and explain the difference between prevalence and incidence
• Define the following epidemiologic measures of association; relative risk, risk ratio, odds ratio, and rate ratio, risk difference and excess risk, including attributable risk and population attributable risk
• Define and describe strengths, weaknesses, and main applications of the designs; ecological, cross-sectional, follow up, case-control and intervention studies
• Define selection bias, information bias and confounding and be aware that evaluating the direction and strength of a possible bias or confounding is essential
• Learn to think along the lines that, when faced with data from an analytic epidemiologic study showing an association (or no association), this might reflect; random error, bias (systematic error), including selection bias or information bias, or confounding, or, if all other possibilities seem unlikely, causality

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 28 hours.

Content: Epidemiologic measures of occurrence and association, study designs - including macro-epidemiological, cross-sectional, case-control and cohort studies as well as experimental, randomized controlled trials - interpretation and inference, including random error, selection and information bias, confounding and effect modification. A specific session will deal with causation. Please see time schedule and teaching objectives for details.

Instructors: Ulrik Schiøler Kesmodel, Bodil Hammer Bech

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus. 

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 21 May 2024 08:30 - 15:30
• 22 May 2024 08:30 - 15:30
• 23 May 2024 08:30 - 15:30
• 24 May 2024 08:30 - 15:30