Five Health Measures From The Epidemiologic Literature Essay Samples

Analysis of AIDS Using Health Measures for Epidemiologic Literature

Analysis of AIDS Using Health Measures for Epidemiologic Literature

Introduction

For someone with little epidemiological knowledge, understanding statistical nomenclature can be a bit challenging. This is because journal articles use multiple terms interchangeably. This study will analyze HIV-AIDS using health measures for epidemiological literature. For any measurement to take place, epidemiologists must consider three factors namely the number of people affected, the size of the population and the length of time that the epidemic has existed.

Risk
According to Auvert, Taljaard, Lagarde, Sobngwi-Tambekou, Sitta, & Puren (2005), risk is also known as the incidence, proportion rate or the attack rate. It measures the probability of unaffected individuals in the population. It usually covers a period of time to ensure that the information is accurate. This can be 1 year, 5 years or 10 years. Any individual who is at risk has 10% chance of developing the disease. For instance, among the total number of people exposed to AIDS, about 10% are likely to develop the virus. Apparently, in case of control studies risk cannot be measured directly since the total population which is at risk cannot be defined.

Rate

Rate may also be termed as the incidence rate. It measures how quickly the health issue is occurring in the population, for instance, it might be looking at how quickly the AIDS menace is spreading. Noordzij, Dekker, Zoccali, & Jager, (2010) explain that, even though the numerator is the same as the risk, the denominator includes the measure of the person-time which can be in years. While measuring the rate, time, place and population must be specified since it is a proportion. For example, this can be the number of new cases of AIDS which develops per 1000 persons –year follow-up.

Prevalence

This is the proportion of the population which has developed the health outcome at any given time. It is preferred in case it is difficult to define the onset of the health outcome. It is the best measure when an individual is studying chronic diseases such as AIDS. Since both the exposure and the outcome are measured at the same time, inferring causality can be very hard. For instance, it can be hard to determine if the suspected cause of AIDS precedes the outcome. Prevalence measures the existence of the disease causes at any particular point over a period of time.

Measures of association

This measure compares the association between the exposure and the heath outcome. This can cover two or more populations. The best measurement is the one with different forms of exposure so that the study can identify factors with possible etiological roles in health outcome onset. It is important to note that evidence of the association does not necessarily mean that the relationship is causal. The common factors of association may be risk differences, risk ratio and odds ratio (Auvert et al., 2005).

Measures of the potential impact

This measure reflects the expected contribution of study factor to the frequency of the disease in a certain population. It is important in predicting the efficacy or effectiveness of a particular treatment or vaccine within a population. It is a combination of frequency and the measure of association. Ideally, the measure also describes the effect of risk factor in causing ill health in the population. Some of the described measures include aspects such as risk difference, rate difference, and relative risk reduction. According to Noordzij et al. (2010), it does this by creating measures of absolute risk at the population level; for instance, measuring the number of people who are at risk of contracting the disease and the ones who are likely to get health interventions.

Conclusion

The five measures used to analyze HIV, AIDS are risk, rate, prevalence, measures of association and measures of the potential impact. While performing these measurements, it is a must to consider the number of affected individuals, the size of the population and the duration of time that the population is studied. Overall, several measures are often used in disease frequency while some of them are formal others may be informal.

References

Auvert, B., Taljaard, D., Lagarde, E., Sobngwi-Tambekou, J., Sitta, R., & Puren, A. (2005).
Randomized, Controlled Intervention Trial of Male Circumcision for Reduction of HIV Infection Risk: The ANRS 1265 Trial. PLOS Medicine, 2(11), 298-304.
Noordzij, M., Dekker, F. W., Zoccali, C., & Jager, K. J. (2010). Measures of Disease Frequency: Prevalence and Incidence. Nephron Clinical Practice, 115(1), 104-120.