Epidemiology for the clinical neurologist

Epidemiology is a foundation of all clinical and public health research and practice. Epidemiology serves seven important uses for the advancement of medicine and public health. It enables community diagnosis by quantifying risk factors and diseases in the community; completes the clinical picture of disease by revealing the entire distribution of disease and presenting meaningful population averages from representative samples; identifies risk factors for disease by detecting and quantifying associations between exposures and disease and evaluating causal hypotheses; computes individual risk to identify high-risk groups to whom preventive interventions can be targeted; evaluates historic trends that monitor disease over time and provide clues to etiology; delineates new syndromes and disease subtypes not previously apparent in clinical settings, helping to streamline effective disease management; and investigates the effects of health services on population health to identify effective public health interventions. The clinician with a grasp of epidemiologic principles is in a position to critically evaluate the research literature, to apply it to clinical practice, and to undertake valid clinical epidemiology research with patients in clinical settings.