Epi Terms
The presence or occurrence of disease, illness, or disability within a population.
What is morbidity?
A smaller group selected from a larger population to participate in a study and provide information about that population.
What is a sample?
Improvements in sanitation, clean water, nutrition, vaccination, and medical care help populations move away from high rates of these diseases.
What are infectious diseases?
In the earliest stage of the demographic transition, both of these population rates are typically high.
What are birth rates and death rates?
This measure combines the number of people being observed with the amount of time each person is followed in a study.
What is person-time?
A researcher records participants as having blood type A, B, AB, or O. This level of measurement uses categories with no natural order.
What is nominal?
An occurrence of disease in a community or region that is clearly greater than what is normally expected.
What is an epidemic?
An epidemic that spreads across multiple countries or continents and affects large numbers of people.
What is a pandemic?
As populations move through the epidemiologic transition, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes become more common. These are collectively known as this type of disease.
What are chronic/noncommunicable diseases?
During the demographic transition, improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare often cause this rate to decline before the birth rate declines.
What is the mortality/death rate?
This measure looks at new cases of disease and uses the amount of person-time at risk in the denominator.
What is the incidence rate?
For the values 3, 5, 7, 9, 20, this measure of central tendency is 7.
What is the median?
The occurrence of death within a population.
The occurrence of death within a population.
The diseases, conditions, injuries, or other health events that may result from an exposure.
What are outcomes?
This transition describes how the major causes of illness and death in a population change over time.
What is the epidemiologic transition?
In the later stages of the demographic transition, both birth and death rates are low, resulting in this general pattern of population change.
What is slow or stable population growth?
This measure tells you how many people in a population have a disease or condition at one specific point in time.
What is point prevalence?
Class rank, pain severity (mild, moderate, severe), and satisfaction ratings are examples of this level of measurement.
What is ordinal?
The entire group of people or individuals that epidemiologists are interested in studying.
What is a population?
The constant or usual presence of a disease or infectious agent within a particular geographic area or population.
What is endemic?
An infectious disease that was once controlled or declining but begins to increase again in a population is described by this term.
What is a reemerging infectious disease?
As more women gain access to this, they may delay marriage and childbirth and have fewer children.
What is education?
At a wedding, 80 people ate the potato salad and 24 later developed food poisoning. This measure would be used to determine the proportion of exposed people who became ill during the outbreak.
What is the attack rate?
This measure of central tendency is calculated by adding all the values in a dataset and dividing the total by the number of values.
What is the mean?
Factors, conditions, behaviors, or substances that a person comes into contact with that may affect health.
What are exposures?
The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age that can influence their health and quality of life.
What are social determinants of health?
This measure represents the average number of years a person is expected to live based on current mortality patterns.
What is life expectancy?
When a population experiences fewer births than deaths over time, the total number of people begins to decrease, resulting in this demographic change.
What is population decline?
A researcher counts everyone who had depression at any time during the 2025–2026 academic year. This measure is being calculated.
What is period prevalence?
Two datasets can have the same mean but look very different because this measure describes how much the observations vary around that mean.
What is standard deviation?