Overview

This seminar aims to provide the students with the basic principles of causal inference in clinical epidemiology. By the end of this seminar, the student should be able to describe the different types of risk factors (predisposing, enabling, reinforcing, precipitating) and Hill's criteria of causation.

Presentation

Please watch this recorded presentation BEFORE you attend the seminar!

06. Causality (Pre-seminar Record) 2023/24

Group Projects

General Instructions

1. Each seminar group will be divided into four or five working groups (WG) according to the students' number.
2. Each WG will be composed of 3-5 students who will work together on preparing the materials and the presentation and delivering the presentation within the seminar room.
3. Each WG will prepare a presentation about one of the prevalent communicable (infectious) or non-communicable (non-infectious) diseases.
4. You can find your teammates and your topic from this spreadsheet:

1. The presentation should be planned to be delivered within 10 minutes at max. The recommended length should not exceed 20 slides.
2. The presentation must be uploaded to my IS Depository at least 60 minutes before your seminar.

Template-related Instructions

1. The presentation has to be prepared using the template below:
   aVLOZ0141c Group Project Template
   
   
2. Title Slide (Slide No. 1) should include the project title, students' names, their UCO numbers and created slide numbers.
   

   Title Slide
   
   
3. Content Slides should follow the visual style of MUNI, i.e. blue, red and black colours and Arial font style.
4. The references of each slide should be displayed at the bottom of the slide (recommended font size 10).
5. The references should be organized and displayed according to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) reference style.
6. You can use reference managers such as Mendeley, Zotero  or EndNote to create your references list. Alternatively, you can use free online citation generators such as Citation Machine® or MyBib.

Presentation-related Instructions

1. The presentation should be divided into five parts.
   Part I: general overview of the disease epidemiology (you can choose to present the global epidemiology of the disease or its regional/local metrics). For example, prevalence, incidence rates, and risk groups based on age, sex, socioeconomic level, etc. It should cover 10-15% of the total presentation content.
   Part II: general overview of the disease's clinical presentations (forms).  It should cover at max. 10% of the total presentation content.
   Part III: general overview of the various social determinants and risk factors related to this disease. It should cover 10-15% of the total presentation content.
   Part IV: presentation and justification of at least two or three major risk factors of the disease. It should cover 50-60% of the total presentation content.
   Part V: preventive interventions or public health measures that can control/prevent the disease. Please use the 4-levels of preventive medicine (primordial, primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention) to classify the preventive interventions.  It should cover at max. 15% of the total presentation content.
2. You should support your selected risk factor(s) and preventive intervention(s) in Parts IV and V using the best available scientific evidence. Remember the evidence hierarchy chart; the most robust evidence usually comes from high-quality systematic reviews, followed by randomized controlled trials, cohort studies, case-control studies, cross-sectional studies, and case series/reports.
3. Presenting the PubMed search strategy that you have used is mandatory.

Seminar-related Instructions (What will happen during the seminar?)

1. While each WG presents their work, the rest of the students will act as a jury committee. It means that after each presentation, the jury committee (audience) must present 4-5 questions to the presenting group related to the content they have been presenting.
2.  The jury's questions need to be precise, clear and related to the methodology of the presented studies or the quality of the acquired evidence. The questions are not supposed to go to the biomedical aspects of the disease/interventions/or outcomes.
3. Kindly be informed that all presentations will be evaluated at the end of the seminar.

Supporting Materials

For Part IV, you can select the risk factors for your assigned disease from the "web of causation" charts (examples below) or from the current literature:

1. Diabetes Mellitus type-2
2. Lung Cancer
3. Oral Cancer
   
4. Chronic Hypertension

To access the full text of articles in PubMed, you have three options:

1. PMC Central: actually some PubMed-indexed records (papers) are archived in the PMC Central repository (which is another database under the US National Center for Biotechnology Information "NCBI").
   
   

   PubMed
2. Publishers' websites (OA): some scholarly articles are published in "Open Access" mode, which means that they are freely available for any internet user regardless of their connection types. It also means you do not need special academic access to read these articles.
3. Publishers' websites (subscribed): some -actually the majority of- scholarly articles are published in subscription mode, meaning you have to use special academic access to read them.
   a) You can download the articles while you are on campus using Eduroam or MUNI networks.
   b) You can still use the university networks if you are living in one of the university dorms. Eduroam and MUNI will also be there.
   c) You can install and use the university network remote access (VPN). Find the instructions here.

Resources

• Required Resources (compulsory)

1. Basic Epidemiology. Chapter 5: Causation in Epidemiology
2. Principles of Epidemiology in Public Health Practice. Lesson One: Introduction to Epidemiology - Section Eight: Concepts of Disease Occurrence Measures
3. Clinical Epidemiology: The Essentials. Chapter 12: Cause
   N.B. In case you are studying from the previous edition (fifth edition) of Clinical Epidemiology: The Essentials, you should study Chapter 12: Cause

Assignment