Evidence-Based Practice for Nurses

(Ben Green) #1
The purpose of descriptive epidemiology is to identify
subgroups in populations that may have the highest risk
for a specific disease or outcome. Descriptive epidemiology
is used to find clues about potential causes of disease so
that nurses can generate hypotheses about the relation-
ship between different exposures and diseases or other
health-related outcomes. Descriptive epidemiology is
used to measure disease frequency by person, place, and time to determine
why disease occurs more frequently under certain conditions.

Person
Many descriptive characteristics of the person are factors that contribute to the
frequency of diseases and health-related outcomes (see Table 8-1).
For example, nurses know that life expectancy varies with sex. Other char-
acteristics such as race and ethnicity contribute to life expectancy. Consider
the average life expectancy in the United States for 2011. For all races and both
sexes, life expectancy was 78.7 years. But there are variations in life expectancy

8.4 Descriptive Epidemiology


By the end of this section, you will be able to:
‹ Explain descriptive characteristics of person, place, and time when examining the
distribution of disease in a population

Age Alcohol
Diet/Exercise Education
Ethnicity Genetic markers
Marital status Occupation
Parity Race
Religion Sex
Smoking Socioeconomic status

TABLE 8-1


Examples of Descriptive
Characteristics by Person

FYI
Descriptive epidemiology is used to find clues
about potential causes of disease so that
nurses can generate hypotheses about the
relationship between different exposures and
diseases or other health-related outcomes.

200 CHAPTER 8 Epidemiologic Designs: Using Data to Understand Populations

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