Discover a Connection Between Air Pollution and Heart Disease
The best way to prove a relationship between an exposure (such as air pollution) and an outcome (such as heart disease) is to conduct an epidemiological study.
Steps
- Come up with a case definition. In this case, what is your definition of heart disease?
- Decide what type of epidemiological study to use. A case-control study is cheap, but prone to recall bias. A cohort study reduces bias, but is costly and time-consuming.
- Select your cases based on outcome if you choose a case-control study. For example, select all people that fit your definition of heart disease from a local hospital. Your controls should come from the same hospital, but cannot have heart disease. Consider selecting your controls from the trauma unit or the maternity ward. Ask both the cases and controls about their past exposures to air pollution. Upon analysis, you may be able to determine if there is a causal relationship between air pollution and heart disease.
- Select your cases based on exposure if you choose a cohort study. For example, select all workers in a coal burning factory who are regularly exposed to air pollution. Your controls need to come from a similar population. You may want to select all worker from a different industry who isn't exposed to air pollution. Follow your cohort for a specified period of time and note who develops heart disease and who doesn't. Upon analysis, you may be able to determine if there is a causal relationship between air pollution and heart disease.
Warnings
- If you are not a professional epidemiologist, your study will probably not be recognized
- Before conducting any kind of study on humans, you must get informed consent from all participants
- Confounding factors or bias could disrupt your study and lead to false assumptions of causality
