Introduction
Scientists and researchers invented various tools to indicate illnesses better and collect data on them. There are plenty of study designs, and some of them that might be appropriate for the case study are cohort, cross-sectional, case-control and ecologic.
Types of Study Designs
A cohort study consists of the research of two groups of people. The first group consists of people who are not sick yet and deprived of the risk factor but are predisposed to the disease. Those who conduct the study observe their condition, and eventually, some of the tested people start to get ill. After that, they are compared to the second group with the risk factor and the outcome. Although that kind of study design is expensive and time-consuming, it will give more persuasive arguments of a causal relationship.
The cross-sectional study design is relatively quick, and the cost for it is low. It can be conducted through surveys, and it covers only a limited period. Therefore, the results may be inaccurate, and it gets hard to indicate whether the risk factor was before the study or appeared after.
Case-control type studies the casual connection also with the help of two groups. One group is already diseased, and another does not have the disease. The study reveals the exposure of both groups and how it affected the outcome. This study design is cheap and quick, but at the same time, the information on the cause can be misinterpreted.
The ecological study design is evaluated on the group level, and it does not consider individual cases. According to Friis and Sellers (2021), the first group comprises people with confirmed diseases, and the other does not have the outcome, but they all come from the same population. This robust method gives precise results because it is more likely that the exposure has happened before the outcome.
Interconnection between exposure and the outcome
The possibility of children getting cancer because of their parents is high and apparent. According to Healthy People 2020 (2020), passive smokers can have respiratory and ear infections, stronger asthma attacks and sudden infant death syndrome. The usage of the ecological design seems to be the most fitting to the case study since the rise of cases when Hispanic children got cancer happened in the same medical institution and between the same population. Thus, there is the observation of the whole group from a particular segment of people.
Influence of the Study Design
The implementation of the chosen design can significantly help people with the improvement of their health. The situation might be unpredictable, considering the interconnection between smoking and cancer. For example, according to Rahal et al. (2017), “prognosis of smoker lung cancer patients is markedly lower than patients who have never smoked”. Therefore, the well-chosen method makes it possible to reveal some problem that affects certain groups of people, find out the causes, and reduce the number of challenging cases among the population subjected to the diseases. This perspective allows preventing such situations and protecting those who are vulnerable to particular risk factors. A great example is the sudden epidemic of cardiovascular disease in the 1950s and its impulse to develop new research and study methods to cope with the issue Framingham Heart Study (2018).
Conclusion
This experience can teach how to evaluate the case and view it correctly to pick the right study design. Thus, it creates an opportunity to collect accurate information, deal with the diseases, and prevent them in the future.
References
Framingham Heart Study. (2018). Epidemiological background and design: The Framingham study. Web.
Friis, R. H., & Sellers, T. A. (2021). Epidemiology for public health practice (6th ed.). Jones & Bartlett.
Healthy People 2020. Topics & Objectives. (2020).Tobacco Use.
Rahal, Z., El Nemr, S., Sinjab, A., Chami, H., Tfayli, A., & Kadara, H. (2017). Smoking and lung cancer: a geo-regional perspective. Frontiers in oncology, 7, 194.