What is ecological fallacy?
A logical error that arises when conclusions are drawn about individuals based on the characteristics of the population to which to those individuals belong.
What are risk factors?
Variables that contribute to the probability of an adverse health outcome.
What does proximate mean?
Close
What does distal mean?
Far
What does intermediate mean?
Between
What are proximal factors?
Micro individual level variables
What is the risk factor model?
A reductionist approach to determining the probability of disease or death by calculating the potential impact of agent variables, biological variables and behavioural variables
What is a host?
Human. The individual that is affected by the agent.
What is an agent?
Things that operate on people like pathogens
What does ‘gender’ mean?
A range of physical and behavioural characteristics associated with social roles that signify masculine and feminine
What is epigenetics?
The study of differences in gene expression that arise from factors other than changes in DNA sequence
What is the social patterning of behaviour?
The usually unconscious determination of behaviour by contextual factors such as place in a social network
What is relative risk?
The ratio of the risk of disease in populations exposed to a factor to the risk of unexposed population
What is secular change?
Long term trends in belief, values and behaviour
Who is John Snow?
- Played a role in developing surgical anesthesia
- Miasma (bad smells) was thought to be a cause for disease.
- Also blamed for the outbreaks of cholera
- He tracked outbreaks and found that cholera was a water borne disease
What is Friedrich Engels?
- found that social and economic change can affect health and longevity and living and working conditions affect health too.
Why is Virchow important?
Medical care, drugs, improved food supply or other ad hoc measures wouldn’t help people in Upper Silesia.
He proposed radical political, economic and social reforms to improve living conditions.
Why is Durkheim important?
- Developed the concept of social facts
What are social facts?
Human artifacts that can act as determinants of behaviour
E.g. suicide reasons vary but rates remain predictable
Why is McKeown important?
Sharp decline in mortality in Western Europe after 1850 is due to changing social and environmental factors
What is the demographic transition?
A transitional period that Canada, Japan and Western Europe find themselves in which results in zero or negative population growth.
What are the 3 phases of demographic transition?
- High birth and high death rate during low economic development —> increase in wealth and urbanization, low death rate but high birth rate (e.g. Africa)
- High birth rate —> Relatively advanced economic development and lower birth rate (e.g. China)
- Low birth and death rates —> Advanced economic development characterized by near stability of birth and death rates (e.g. Canada)
Describe epidemiological transition
Change from infectious and parasitic diseases in poorer places to chronic diseases in richer ones
What is morbidity
Any departure from a normal state like illness or disability
