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Lecture Notes

The field of study that examines the incidence and distribution of disease at the population level is called epidemiology, and incidence, like we just learned, refers to the number of new cases, and distribution refers to how these cases are spread out among the population. So for example, is the disease more common among people with specific characteristics? So do women get the disease more often than men? Does it occur more frequently with increased age? Are African Americans or Asian Americans more likely to get the disease? All of those are questions that the field of epidemiology might ask. Now variables that increase the probability of getting an illness or dying from that illness are considered risk factors, and some of these, such as smoking and physical inactivity, are behavioral choices, but some, such as race, obviously cannot be changed, and we call those non-modifiable risk factors. And we'll talk about the risk factors for diabetes later in this lesson, but what's important to note here about risk factors is that just because someone has a particular risk factor doesn't mean that they necessarily will develop the disease, only that they have an increased likelihood of developing that disease.