What factors should be considered in measuring long-term changes in disease frequency over time?

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ABC of EpidemiologyMeasuring disease occurrence
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What are the measures of disease frequency?
Which of the following must be considered while measuring disease occurrence?
Which factor can affect prevalence of a specific disease over time?
What is the importance of measures of disease frequency?

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ABC of EpidemiologyMeasuring disease occurrence

Different measures may be used to describe how often disease (or another health event) occurs in a population. Incidence expresses the development of new cases and is mostly used against the background of prevention, to assess disease etiology or to determine the risk factors of disease. Depending on the specific study question, incidence may be reported as risk or as incidence rate. This paper discusses that it is preferable to use incidence rate in case of a dynamic population or in cases where the observation period is sufficiently long for competing risks or loss to follow-up to play a significant role. Prevalence is the number of existing cases, which is affected by both the number of incident cases and the length of disease time. It reflects the burden of disease on a population that may, among others, be measured in terms of costs or morbidity. Knowledge about this burden can be used for the planning of health-care facilities. This paper discusses the different measures of disease occurrence using a number of examples taken from the nephrology literature.

Keywords

disease occurrence

risk

incidence rate

prevalence

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What are the measures of disease frequency?

Incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates are three frequency measures that are used to characterize the occurrence of health events in a population.

Which of the following must be considered while measuring disease occurrence?

To do this, the following must be clearly defined: (1) What is meant by a case, i.e., an individual in a population who has the disease, or undergoes the event of interest (e.g., death). (2) The population from which the cases originate. (3) The period over which the data were collected.

Which factor can affect prevalence of a specific disease over time?

Prevalence is the proportion of a population that has a condition at a specific time, but the prevalence will be influenced by both the rate at which new cases are occurring (incidence) and the average duration of the disease.

What is the importance of measures of disease frequency?

Measuring the frequency of a disease or other health outcome in a population and identifying how the disease frequency may differ over time or among subgroups are important steps in discovering potential causes of a disease and determining effective methods for prevention and care.