Physiotherapy

Biostatistics and Epidemiology2

Bioestatística e Epidemiologia

Course code:9504117

Francisco Jorge Fernandes Caldeira

Learning outcomes of the curricular unit:

Instrumental competences

  • Know the limitations of statistical analysis;
  • Adapt the methodology to the problem under study;
  • Distinguish descriptive statistics from statistical inference;
  • Apply techniques of descriptive statistics;
  • Use combinatorial analysis techniques;
  • Understand the concept of sampling distribution;
  • Understand the concepts of population, sample, parameter estimator and skewness;
  • Estimate confidence intervals;
  • Distinguish parametric and nonparametric tests;
  • Apply parametric and nonparametric tests;
  • Understanding the impact of epidemiology in disease prevention, health promotion and in the control of new epidemics;
  • Identify the characteristics, advantages, disadvantages and indications of different epidemiological studies in the area of physiotherapy;
  • Reflect on the role of epidemiology to improve the health of individuals and populations;
    • The concept of risk and causality;
  • Identify the characteristics, indications, advantages and disadvantages of the different epidemiological studies in the area of physical therapy;
  • Define and explain the importance of health indicators;
  • Reflect on the Epidemiology’s role to improve individual and population health.

Global Syllabus

  • Solving problems and application of concepts taught in lectures
  • SPSS is used in solving some of the exercises
Theoretical Components:
  1. Notions of probability: total probability Theorem; conditional probability; independent events
  2. Random variables and univariate probability distributions: discrete and continuous random variables; probability, density and distribution functions; Uniform, Binomial, Poisson, Normal, Chi-square, Student's t-and F-Snedecor distributions; Central Limit Theorem
  3. Confidence Intervals: confidence interval for the mean and for a proportion of a population
  4. Hypothesis testing: statistical hypothesis; error types
  5. Parametric tests: T-Student tests: one sample; independent samples, paired samples; ANOVA
  6. Nonparametric tests: Goodness of fit tests: Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk; Binomial test; independence chi-square and association measures
  7. Epidemiology in Disease Prevention / Health Promotion: The concept of disease’s natural history; Clinical versus epidemiological method; Prevention versus health promotion; Screening and opportunistic detection; New epidemics such as Ebola, cholera, malaria, meningitis and measles
  8. Epidemiological surveillance in community´s morbidity and mortality; Incidence and prevalence rates; Mortality rates, lethality, proportional mortality, potentially lost years of life; The electronic death certificate; The flu and the sentinel doctors; The Ror-south (regional cancer registry)
  9. Risk and causality: Absolut risk, relative risk, attributable relative risk and odds ratio; Causality criteria
  10. Epidemiological studies: cohort, case-control, cross-sectional, ecological, experimental; clinical trial
  11. Health indicators: Relationship with the life cycle phase; Quality of life indicators
  12. Prevention I, II, III and IV throughout the life cycle: Society’s medicalization;Drug Interactions
  13. Epidemiology to improve individuals and populations health: Epidemiology and the epidemiological method in today’s world
Suggested Bibliography:
  • Pedroso de Lima, J.J. (2014) Biofísica Médica, 3ª Edição, Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra
  • Pope, J. (1999) Medical Physics Imaging. Heinemann, Oxford.
  • Wilson, J. D. e Buffa, A. J. (2003) College Physics. 5ª edição, Prentice Hall, New Jersey.