Group items tagged

"The link between air pollution and dementia remains controversial-even its proponents warn that more research is needed to confirm a causal connection and work out just how the particles might enter the brain and make mischief there. But a growing number of epidemiological studies from around the world, new findings from animal models and human brain imaging studies, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for modeling PM2.5 exposures have raised alarms. Indeed, in an 11-year epidemiological study to be published next week in Translational Psychiatry, University of Southern California (USC) researchers will report that living in places with PM2.5 exposures higher than the Environmental Protection Agency's standard of 12 μg/m3 nearly doubled dementia risk in older women. If the finding holds up in the general population, air pollution could account for roughly 21% of dementia cases worldwide,"

"The introduction of causal diagrams (directed acyclic graphs, or DAGs) into the epidemiologic literature, has established a new approach to conceptualize confounding and new rules to identify minimal sufficient adjustment sets have been established."

Why data resource profiles (DRPs)? We can't do epidemiology without data. Data are cen- tral to epidemiology's three main challenges: to describe health states in populations, make inferences about their causes and to apply that knowledge to improve health. The more high quality data we have to support these three tasks, the better.10,11 The challenge of providing health data coverage on a global scale is immense. Termed a 'scandal of invisi- bility', in the world's least developed countries more than two-thirds of all births and deaths go unregis- tered.12 Meanwhile, in advanced industrialised na- tions publicly funded data collection systems are under threat, particularly at a time of state retrench- ment.13 In the UK and Canada the long-form census was cancelled. Canada, too, cancelled some of its premier longitudinal studies of children and youth, leaving the country with little signal about the state of human capability development of its future gener- ations. Removing parts of the publicly funded health information infrastructure is easy, but rebuilding sur- veillance will require orders of magnitude more vision, dedication and money.

One person's quest to tackle a rare disease, not typically the subject of social epidemiology. Is there, however, something to learn from his approach?

"Innovative thinking: Can you be taught?: Roberta B. Ness" (using examples from her field of epidemiology & health)

See diagrams on causal webs (more like chains)

"kaplanj@oregonstate.edu"