Epidemiology

Aim

This Section of the Journal of Personalized Medicine seeks to publish high-quality, peer-reviewed, and evidence-based contributions that advance the area of personalized medicine in connection to epidemiology. Epidemiology is defined as the scientific, methodical, and data-driven study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states and occurrences (not only illnesses) in defined populations. Epidemiology is a cornerstone of public health, shaping policy choices and evidence-based practice by identifying disease risk factors and preventative healthcare priorities.

Scope

The topics of interest, with a view toward personalized medicine, include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Illness causation: an essential topic in biomedical disciplines; strong etiological explanations are required in order to establish treatment methods in medicine and public health initiatives.
• Transmission of diseases: the transmission of a pathogen responsible for communicable illness from an infected host individual or group to a specific individual or group.
• Investigation of disease outbreak: identifying the cause of a disease.
• Disease surveillance: an information-based activity that entails the collecting, analysis, and interpretation of massive amounts of data from many sources.
• Environmental epidemiology: determining how environmental exposures impact human health.
• Forensic epidemiology: establishing evidence-based probabilistic judgments regarding the kind and magnitude of causal relationship between a prior harmful exposure and a resulting injury or illness in both groups and individuals.
• Occupational epidemiology: characterizing occupational illnesses and determining their fundamental causes.
• Screening of diseases: the use of a medical treatment or test on patients who do not yet have symptoms of a certain disease in order to determine their chance of getting the ailment.
• Biomonitoring: the measurement of environmental chemicals and/or their metabolites in biological media, such as blood or urine.
• Comparisons of treatment effects, such as in clinical trials.

Download Section Flyer