Each student is to produce a formal statistical report for their allocated disease containing the following information: 1. Identify and briefly describe the aetiological causes. These may include,...

Each student is to produce a formal statistical report for their allocated disease containing the following information:

1. Identify and briefly describe the aetiological causes. These may include, for example:

•    • Environmental (eg. infection from micro-organism, cigarette smoking)

•    • Genetic (identify the gene[s] where possible; method of inheritance)

•    • Idiopathic

•    • Iatrogenic

2. Identify and briefly describe the main treatments for this condition. These may include, for example:

•    • Pharmacological

•    • Surgical

•    • Other therapeutic: including physiotherapy, counselling, radiation therapy, chemotherapy

•    • Behavioural or lifestyle actions such as smoking cessation or weight loss

•    • No known treatment available

3. Identify and evaluate the best level of evidence for

•    • two of the most significant aetiological causes (it is recognised that for some diseases, e.g. genetic diseases, there

may be only one) OR

•    • two of the most significant treatments.

This will likely be helped by finding a recent relevant systematic review (meta-analysis) or searching the Cochrane Library.

For the you find:

Outline why you think this is the best level of evidence
Describe the types of epidemiological (and other) research strategies used to produce the evidence.

best level of evidence

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•    • Describe the limitations of these studies.

•    • Evaluate the strength of the evidence in terms of it statistical and clinical significance

4. Describe the epidemiological statistical profile of this disease. Include:

•    • Incidence and prevalence; include incidence rates for Victoria, and Australia (where available), for the most

recently available 5-year period. If the disease is rare, obtain comparative international statistics.

•    • Typical age at onset.

•    • Age, gender and geographical distribution (locate the data for Australia, if available, or internationally if you are

researching a rare disease).

•    • Mortality rate, if relevant (locate the data for Australia, if available; or internationally)

•    • A comparative analysis using the statistics of another country with similar health and socio-economic factors

(where available).

•
5. “Obtain” data from the VAED (data set which is used for HIM5IHC) on your disease entity for the following:

•    • the prevalence of this disease in admitted patients

•    • the age distribution for this disease

•    • the gender distribution for this disease

•    • the length of stay

•    • whether this disease is a principal diagnosis compared to an associated diagnosis.

•    • a comparative analysis with statistics for this disease from the VAED dataset with national and international

data

NB: You must draft a letter (email) that you would use to request this data and include it as an appendix to the report. This will be included in the marking grid. You must consider all the details you would need to provide the recipient so they could abstract the relevant data.

6. Evaluate both the quality of the data and the data sources from which you obtained your data for the epidemiological statistical profile