Epidemiology

What is epidemiology?

Epidemiology describes the occurrence and distribution of diseases within populations, geographic regions and time (descriptive epidemiology) and studies the etiology, risk-factors and other determinants of health and disease (analytic epidemiology). Epidemiology is both a basic science and a methodological science with numerous interfaces to medicine, psychology, social-science, the "classic" natural sciences and philosophy. Epidemiology is a necessarily multi-disciplinary field with a long tradition of interdisciplinary cooperation.

What is Epidemiology doing?

The domain of epidemiology is population-based research, considering questions of health and disease. Quite often epidemiology addresses questions in the area of curative and palliative clinical medicine. Problems include etiology (e.g. unveiling reasons and risk-factors causing specific diseases), therapy (e.g. exploring the effectiveness and side-effects of medicines and other strategies of treatment), quality of care (e.g. an analysis of presentations of medical and other health specific benefits, motivations and obstacles in their use trough the patients), prevention (e.g. concepts, design, implementation, management and evaluation of intervention programs) and rehabilitation (e.g. determining the affectivity and efficiency).

Working Group on Epidemiology in the Competence Network malignant Lymphomas

Various groups dealing with epidemiological questions have initiated a working group "AG Epidemiology" within the competence network.

Current projects

• TOPICS-ML: Therapy-optimizing-protocols in chemo- and radiation therapy for patients with malignant lymphomas. (TP12 Epidemiology) W. Hoffmann
• Northern-Germany Leukaemia- and Lymphoma-study (NLL) W. Hoffmann
• AG lymphoma causes: Descriptive Epidemiology and predisposing factors of malignant lymphomas Aydemir, M. Dreyling, W. Hiddemann, D. Hölzel, K. Straif
• Case-Control-Study: Epidemiologic case-control-study on the etiology of lymphomas in adults A. Nieters, N. Becker

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