Board Review Course 2026: Epidemiology (Video & Slides)-BRC 2026_Epidemiology

Video Transcription

Video Summary

This lecture is an ACPM board review on epidemiology, covering major concepts needed for the exam. It begins with measures of disease frequency: counts, rates, cumulative incidence, incidence density, prevalence, mortality, case fatality, proportional mortality, birth and fertility rates, fetal/neonatal/perinatal/infant death rates, years of potential life lost, life expectancy, and lifetime risk. It also explains how these measures relate to each other and how they are used in public health planning and interpretation.<br /><br />The talk then reviews descriptive epidemiology, focusing on person, place, and time patterns, data sources such as vital records, cancer registries, medical records, surveys, and reportable disease systems, and common challenges like case definition and cohort effects. It next covers measures of excess risk, including relative risk, odds ratio, attributable risk, attributable risk percent, population attributable risk, and number needed to treat.<br /><br />A large section is devoted to study design: descriptive studies, case-control studies, cohort studies, randomized controlled trials, pragmatic trials, natural experiments, group randomized trials, quasi-experiments, interrupted time series, regression discontinuity, and Mendelian randomization. The lecture emphasizes sources of bias, confounding, effect modification, internal vs external validity, and how to assess causation using Bradford Hill criteria.<br /><br />The final sections address disease screening, including sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, cutoff selection, lead-time and length-time bias, and serial vs parallel testing. The lecture closes with infectious disease epidemiology: infectivity, infectiousness, pathogenicity, virulence, transmission routes, reservoirs, herd immunity, epidemic patterns, outbreak curves, and control strategies such as isolation, quarantine, contact tracing, and vaccination.

Keywords

epidemiology

disease frequency

incidence

prevalence

mortality

case fatality

relative risk

odds ratio

study design

confounding

Bradford Hill criteria

screening tests

sensitivity and specificity

infectious disease epidemiology

herd immunity