HNC Health Care

Epidemiology and Sociology

Epidemiology and Sociology

Epidemiologists have a key role to play in identifying the social factors affecting Health. Four main techniques are employed in their work.

Epidemiologists record the incidence of illness or disease in different populations. They may compare the rates of disease or illness in different countries, different regions and different groups.

Example Morbidity rates for Men Vs women or different social groups etc.

In which the epidemiologist compares the members of a given social group who the illness or disease(the cases) with others from the same group without it (the controls). They are thus a sort of retrospective experiment. In this sort of research, it is important to ensure that the two groups have indeed being drawn from the same population. Only by doing this will it be possible to identify the key factors distinguish the cases from the controls.

This particular technique led researchers to identify the factors for the transmission of HIV infection in the early 1980s. Amongst injecting drug users, for example, it was found that those who shared needles and syringes were more likely to acquire the infection than others. This led to the conclusion that in so far as the risk of HIV is concerned , it is not whether you inject drugs that matters but how injection takes place. Provided sterile equipment is used on every occasion, and provided syringes and needles are not shared HIV is not transmitted by this route.

Data is collected from matched groups of individuals. These differ from each other in terms of a key variable which it is hypothesized might be the cause of the disease or illness under investigation. Thus in studying lung cancer, a cohort of smokers might be compared with a group of non-smokers matched on the basis of sex, occupational background, race and age to determine whether or not smoking might plausibly be identified as a cause of the disease.

The incidence of a particular complaint is studied amongst members of a group who have moved from one part of the world to another, amongst the communities they have left , and amongst the communities they have joined. By obtaining these three sets of data it can be possible to identify the cause of illness and disease.

Migrant studies have been very useful in enabling researchers to distinguish between genetic and social causes of ill-health.

For example the reasons for low incidence of breast cancer in women in Japan compared with the USA was thought to be genetic in nature however migrant studies have shown that when Japanese women move to the USA their rates of breast cancer rise steady over successive generations to equal the USA rate.