Relationship Between Urine Metal Levels and Diabetes Prevalence

PURPOSE: The purpose of the final project is to summarize the knowledge that you have acquired in the Introduction to Epidemiology class and apply this knowledge to analyze and critique an article describing an epidemiologic study.

Skills: The purpose of this assignment is to help you practice the following skills:

• Explain the use of observational studies in inferences about disease causation

• Interpret measures of association provided in an epidemiologic study

• Describe how confounding was controlled in the study

• Describe how bias was prevented in this study

• Appply the Hill’s criteria of causation to a specific example of the epidemiologic study

• Describe the application of epidemiologic methods to studying disease and their risk factors Knowledge:

By working on the final project, you will continue strengthening your knowledge on epidemiological concepts and their application to studying diseases and their determinants in the population.

TASK: Please, select one article from the list of the articles provided by the instructor in the folder Paper Review->Aricles for Review. Read the article that you selected and answer the questions based on the content of the article that you selected. Background: Read the background and significance section of the paper and answer these questions:

1. What is the public health significance of this topic/study?

2. Why is there a need to conduct this particular study? What knowledge gap will this study address?

3. What is the aim/hypothesis of this study? Methods and Measurements: Read the methods and measurements section of the paper and answer these questions:

4. What study design was described in this article? Describe the features of this study that align with the study design that you identified.

5. Who were the participants and how were they recruited? Read about the data collection and answer these questions:

6. What are the exposure and the outcome of this study? How were they defined in this study?

7. How was the data on (1) the exposure; (2) the outcome; (3) other covariates collected in this study? Describe the method of the data collection in detail. Read the Results section of the paper and answer the following questions:

8. Report and interpret the main measure of association that estimated the association between the exposure and disease in this study. If there are several measures of association reported, select any of them for interpretation

9. Describe how confounding was controlled in this study.

10. Describe the measures that were taken to prevent bias from occurring Read the Discussion section of this study and answer the following questions:

11. Describe how, in this article, epidemiologic methods (sampling, specific study design, data collection, controlling for confounding, preventing bias from occurring) were applied to study a disease of interest and its risk factor(s)

12. This question refers to Hill’s criteria of causation. Name one Hill’s criteria and apply them to the context of the article to provide evidence that the exposure discussed in this article causes the outcome of interest.

13. Name another Hill’s criteria and apply them to the context of the article to provide evidence that the exposure discussed in this article causes the outcome of interest.

14. Explain how this study is used in building evidence for causal link between exposure and the outcome. In your response, refer to the possibility of (1) chance, (2) bias, and (3) confounding as alternative explanations to study findings.

15. To continue with the previous question, explain how this study aligns with the pyramid of the hierarchy of evidence for causality.

FORMATTING GUIDELINES: Your response to the questions of this assignment should be not shorter than 5-6 pages. Use Times New Roman, size 12, double-spaced, 1-inch margins Answer the questions in full sentences, and do not use bullet points In the document that contains the answers to the article review questions, please, use subheadings and numbering of the questions so it is clear to me which questions you are addressing.