The course is designed to achieve the following objectives:
To introduce the students to the concepts of epidemiology and its integration with clinical medicine.
To introduce the students to the methods of research in the health field.
To improve the students' abilities to critically read medical and health-related literature.
To provide students with some basic skills in quantification of disease and interpretation of data.
Teaching methods include lectures, class discussions, and exercises.
At the end of this course we expect the student to have the basic knowledge and skills to:
1- Define epidemiology and know its scope.
2- Understand time trends of disease and how to investigate epidemics.
3- Understand the different study types and designs and their strengths and limitations
4- Know the concept of sampling and the different methods of sampling including their strengths and limitations.
5- Understand screening, validity, reliability, predictive value, receiver operating characteristics and related issues.
6- Understand criteria of causality.
7- Calculate and interpret measures of associations such as the relative risk, odds ratio, correlation coefficient, and attributable risk.
8- Calculate and interpret measures of disease occurrence such as incidence and prevalence.
9- Formulate research question/questions.
10- Propose an appropriate research design.
11- Select appropriate data collection methods.
12- Plan and perform the basic statistical analysis.
13- Interpret study findings and draw valid conclusions.
14- Understand the concept of confounding and the different types of bias.
15- Critically read the literature and identify possible pitfalls.