Rooney B K, Silman A J
ARC Epidemiology Unit, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
Curr Opin Rheumatol. 1999 Mar;11(2):91-7. doi: 10.1097/00002281-199903000-00002.
Epidemiologic studies of rheumatic diseases can be broadly divided into those that describe the occurrence of specific disorders, those that attempt to quantify the role of putative risk factors for disease occurrence, and those that define the outcome and factors associated with it. Studies in this area have tended to be hypothesis testing rather than generating new etiologic or related hypotheses. In contrast to many previously published studies, more recent work has been both substantive in size and focused more on true community-based studies with the consequence that estimates of occurrence in risk obtained are likely to reflect more accurately the true nature of any associations observed.
描述特定疾病的发生情况；试图量化假定的疾病发生风险因素的作用；以及确定疾病结局及其相关因素。该领域的研究往往倾向于进行假设检验，而非提出新的病因学或相关假设。与许多先前发表的研究不同，最近的研究规模更大，且更多地聚焦于真正基于社区的研究，其结果是，所获得的风险发生率估计值可能更准确地反映所观察到的任何关联的真实性质。
