Course Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology

The course C177/15 Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, spring 2026.

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: 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 30 hours. Teaching consists of ten 3-hour sessions, each with ~1.5 hour lectures and ~1.5 hour workshops.

Below is a reading guideline to prepare for each session. 

Content: 

The course will include:

Introduction to clinical epidemiology

Measures of disease frequency, measures of effect, measures of association

Randomised controlled trials, observational cohort studies, emulated target trials

Case-control studies

Evaluation & control of confounding

Advanced topics in clinical epidemiology including:

Introduction to directed acyclic graphs

Information bias & selection bias

Effect modification & interaction

Propensity score methods

Pre-class preparation:

Preparation for each session is given on the following pages and include book-chapters, articles and videos. The books are available from AU library as e-books:

Fletcher et al. Clinical Epidemiology: The Essentials. 5th ed. Wolters Kluwer, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central - Detail page (statsbiblioteket.dk)

Rothman. Epidemiology: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central - Detail page (statsbiblioteket.dk)

If you have trouble with the links above, please log in via your “wayf” log in and perform the search as normal. You will find e-books on this link: https://library.au.dk/en/resources/books-e-books/ AND select the link for “ProQuest Ebook central” and search for the books.

Below is a reading guide designed to help students focus their preparatory reading. We recommend that students read the assigned reading material before the class begins, so that they will have some foundation in the topics before they arrive. We will discuss topics during the week, but we will not review the reading material in detail during class time. There is some preparation required for each class so please refer to the table below for the details.

Instructors: Deirdre Cronin Fenton, Christian F. Christiansen, Signe Sørup, Mette Lise Lousdal, Julie A. Schmidt, Oleguer Plana-Ripoll, Reimar Thomsen, Mette Kielsholm Thomsen, Kirsten Woolpert

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:

• 23 February 2026 09:00 - 15:30
• 25 February 2026 09:00 - 15:30
• 27 February 2026 09:00 - 15:30
• 02 March 2026 09:00 - 15:30
• 04 March 2026 09:00 - 15:30