Abstract
Many concepts of epidemiology such as incidence or prevalence of a disease, mortality and risk factors have already appeared in previous chapters. Their meaning was sufficiently clear to allow a preliminary discussion of the basic principles of epidemiology, of its role in public health and of the main issues in the epidemiology of infectious diseases but a rigorous definition was missing. Without rigorous definitions, however, it is impossible to conduct epidemiologic studies of any value. Hence we are now going to state the main definitions while restricting ourselves to the fundamental ones and not entering into the many ramifications that exist.
The basic concepts of epidemiology are presented first for a target population and then for a study population.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Krickeberg, K., Van Trong, P., Thi My Hanh, P. (2019). Basic Concepts of Epidemiology. In: Epidemiology. Statistics for Biology and Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16368-6_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16368-6_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16367-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16368-6
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)