ECTS: 2.6
Course leader: Deirdre Cronin Fenton
Language: English
Graduate school: Faculty of Health
Graduate program: ClinFO
Course fee: 3,120.00 DKK
Status: Course is finished
Semester: Spring 2022
Application deadline: 31/01/2022
Cancellation deadline: 14/02/2022
Course type: Classroom teaching
Start date: 28/02/2022
Administrator: Johanne Gregor Nielsen
The course C177/11 Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, spring 2022.
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).
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.
Learning outcomes: The course includes lectures and exercises on the following:
- Providing a broad knowledge and understanding of clinical epidemiology
- Designing a clinical epidemiology study
- Understanding measures of disease frequency, effect and association, and which are appropriate to each study design
- Assessing study validity, including identifying various biases and sources of error in epidemiological studies
- Interpreting clinical epidemiology research papers
Session 1: Introduction to clinical epidemiology Session
Session 2: Measures of disease frequency, measures of effect, and measures of association Session
Session 3: Study design: RCT and observational cohort studies
Causality in clinical research and randomization (RCT design)
Assessing causality without randomization (cohort design)
Random error and p-values
Session 4: Study design: case-control studies
Principles of case-control design
Case-control designs and consequences
Relation between measures of association (again)
Session 5: VALIDITY PART I: Evaluation and control of confounding
Confounding and confounders: DAGS
Confounding by indication
Control of confounding at design stage: Restriction, randomization, matching
Control of confounding at analysis stage: stratification, regression
Matching in cohort studies vs. case-control studies
Session 6: VALIDITY PART II: Information bias and selection bias
Information bias — theory, consequences, design implications
Selection bias — theory, consequences, design implications
Validation studies
Session 7: Effect modification & Interaction
Concepts of interaction
Additive and multiplicative models
Effect measure modification
Session 8: Advanced topics in clinical epidemiology
Brief introduction to DAGitty
Advanced methods to control confounding: propensity scores, IPTW
Immortal time bias
Venue: "Loftsalen" (1266-316), The Victor Albeck Building, Vennelyst Blvd. 4, 8000 Aarhus C.
Participation in the course is without cost for:
- PhD students, Research Year students and Research Honours Programme students from Aarhus University
- PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc network
- PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses
Course dates:
- 28 February 2022 09:00 - 15:30
- 02 March 2022 09:00 - 15:30
- 07 March 2022 09:00 - 15:30
- 09 March 2022 09:00 - 15:30