Biostatistics and Epidemiology
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:
- Notions of probability: total probability Theorem; conditional probability; independent events
- 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
- Confidence Intervals: confidence interval for the mean and for a proportion of a population
- Hypothesis testing: statistical hypothesis; error types
- Parametric tests: T-Student tests: one sample; independent samples, paired samples; ANOVA
- Nonparametric tests: Goodness of fit tests: Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk; Binomial test; independence chi-square and association measures
- 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
- 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)
- Risk and causality: Absolut risk, relative risk, attributable relative risk and odds ratio; Causality criteria
- Epidemiological studies: cohort, case-control, cross-sectional, ecological, experimental; clinical trial
- Health indicators: Relationship with the life cycle phase; Quality of life indicators
- Prevention I, II, III and IV throughout the life cycle: Society’s medicalization;Drug Interactions
- 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.