Course Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology

The course C177/13 Introduction to Clinical 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). Completion of core and specific basic courses in epidemiology and statistics is required.

Aim: To introduce PhD students to the fundamentals of design and analysis of clinical epidemiology research. Each concept will be introduced in a lecture. Students will then carry out in-class exercises applying the fundamental principles introduced in the lecture to actual examples from the scientific literature. Students are not required to complete an exam at the end of the course. Participation is mandatory to achieve ECTs points.

Learning outcomes:
The course includes lectures and exercises on the following:

1) Providing a broad knowledge and understanding of clinical epidemiology
2) Designing a clinical epidemiology study
3) Understanding measures of disease frequency, effect and association, and which are appropriate to each study design
4) Assessing study validity, including identifying various biases and sources of error in epidemiological studies
5) Interpreting clinical epidemiology research papers

Workload: The full workload of the course is expected to be 37hours

Content: 

Interactive group work and lectures

Morning sessions: 9-12. Afternoon sessions: 12:30-15:30

Outline:

1. Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology
2. Measures of disease frequency, measures of effect & measures of association
3. Study design 1: Randomised clinical trials & observational cohort studies
4. Study design 2: Case-control studies
5. Validity part 1: Evaluation and control of confounding
6. Validity part 2: Information bias & selection bias
7. Introduction to bias analysis
8. Advanced topics in clinical epidemiology 1: Introduction to DAGs
9. Effect modification & interaction
10. Advanced topics in clinical epidemiology 2

Instructors: Deirdre Cronin Fenton (head of course), Christian F. Christiansen, Signe Sørup, Anne Sofie Dam Laursen, Julie Andersen Schmidt, Oleguer Plana-Ripoll

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus (other)

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:

• 26 February 2024 09:00 - 15:30
• 28 February 2024 09:00 - 15:30
• 01 March 2024 09:00 - 15:30
• 04 March 2024 09:00 - 15:30
• 06 March 2024 09:00 - 15:30