Blogs

This format is a general one. Additional information may be required in special cases like obstetric, infants, elderly etc.
It's an effort so that you don't miss out any section of history taking. All the best!

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Single blinding: when the patient does not know if he/she is getting the drug or placebo

Double blinding: where the patient and the dispensing doctor also does not know whether the patient is getting the drug or placebo

1. To study the disease trend since past
2. Community diagnosis
3. Planning and evaluation of health services
4. Evaluation of a new therapy or a new health measure
5. Determining the risk to an individual
6. Identification of syndromes
7. Filling in the gaps in the natural history of the disease
8. Searching for the cause of a disease

1. Proceeds from the outcome to cause
2. Starts with cases of disease
3. Tests if the suspected risk factor occurs more often in the cases than that in the controls
4. Usually the first study for testing a hypothesis
5. Requires fewer number of participants
6. Yields the results relatively earlier
7. Suitable for rare diseases
8. Cannot directly estimate the relative risk hence calculates the ‘Odd’s ratio’ (OR)
9. Only one outcome (disease) can be studied
10. Inexpensive

Definition of ‘Monitoring’:
Monitoring is the performance and analysis of routine measurements aimed at detecting changes in the environment or health status of the population.
Monitoring can be of variety of activities like:
• Health program
• Air quality
• Water quality
• Intrauterine growth
• Nutritional status
• Functioning of a health facility etc.

Definition of ‘Surveillance’:

Advantages

• Easy to conduct as no follow up is required
• No attrition, as no follow up is needed
• Gives faster results
• Inexpensive
• Suitable for rare and newly identified diseases
• More than one risk factors can be studied simultaneously
• Ethical problem lesser as disease has already occurred

Disadvantages

Advantages

• Incidence can be directly calculated
• Direct estimation of the relative risk (RR)
• More than one outcome of the risk factor can be studied
• Dose response relationship with exposure can be studied
• Temporal association of the exposure with the outcome can be seen
• Certain biases like recall bias, interviewer’s bias are not a problem

Disadvantages

There are two broad types of epidemiological studies:
1. Observational studies – we do not interfere in the process of the disease, but simply observe the disease and the associated factors.
2. Experimental studies – deliberate intervention is made and the effect of such intervention is observed.

Observational studies include:
Descriptive study and
Analytical study – Case control and cohort studies are the two types of analytical observational studies

It is a tool for analysing the interaction between the different sectors of an economy. An understanding of inter-sectoral interactions can aid in optimizing the planning of public health policies.
Such analyses result in creation of ‘Input-output matrices’.
The main function is to make it possible to evaluate a sector’s requirements to satisfy a given demand for goods and services.