Epidemiology is one of the most rapidly developing disciplines globally due to its value for healthcare. The goal of clinical epidemiology is to optimize the processes of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of a particular patient based on an assessment of the treatment and diagnostic process using data from epidemiological studies. Furthermore, the discipline addresses theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of gathering and proceeding with the data, providing clinical medicine and guidelines development with a sufficient scientific basis.
Epidemiology’s data-driven approaches make it reliable by reducing the chances of biased conclusions and systematic by structuring the information. The discipline’s significant benefit is the variety of data types and performance measurements that provide a complex scope of data applied in different cases. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic was determined through a hospital and emergency departments’ reports about screenings and lung ventilator use and death rates sorted by age, sex, origin, and comorbidities (Centers of Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], n. d.). Age-based statistics revealed that 275,187 deaths involving coronavirus were among people 75-84 years old – the highest index by age (CDC, 2022). The massive volume of diverse information allows epidemiologists to identify the disease’s symptoms, prevalence among specific populations, risks, and treatment strategies in their guidelines.
Epidemiology’s objectives are developing substantiated clinical recommendations and standards for diagnosis, the prognosis of diseases’ course, treatment methods’ formation, and preventative practices’ design. Analyzing the recent COVID-19 outbreak, and counting the number of cases, including mild cases, is essential to calibrate the epidemic response (Lipsitch et al., 2020). According to CDC (n. d.), over a million deaths were counted in the United States during the pandemic. The data obtained in epidemiological studies are applicable for the epidemiological substantiation of preventive programs about infectious and non-communicable diseases (Lake, 2020). This demonstrates the need for clinical guidelines and standards to prevent the spread of certain epidemiological diseases.
Epidemiology is a branch of science that allows the development of standards for diagnosis, treatment, and prevention based on evidence and selecting an appropriate algorithm of actions for each specific clinical case. The discipline is a vital scientific foundation for studying abnormal conditions’ symptoms, prevalence, and severity and identifying if serious measures such as quarantines should be included in treatment guidelines. The development of clinical epidemiology and the expansion of the teaching of this section will undoubtedly contribute to the progress of medical science and the public health system.
References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). Provisional death counts for coronavirus disease. Web.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n. d.). National Center for Health Statistics.
Lake, M. A. (2020). What we know so far: COVID-19 current clinical knowledge and research. Clinical medicine (London, England), 20(2), 124-127. Web.
Lipsitch, M., Phil, D., Swerdlow, D. L., & Finelli, L. (2020). Defining the epidemiology of COVID-19.The New England Journal of Medicine, 382, 1194-1196. Web.