School of Public Health, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.
Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York City, New York.
Am J Epidemiol. 2019 May 1;188(5):883-885. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwy222.
Epidemiology has long been concerned with understanding the causes of health and disease states so that we can improve the health of populations. Despite broad agreement on this definition of the field, we continue to debate certain core goals of epidemiology: whether epidemiology is a pragmatic science or not, which methods constitute epidemiologic methods, and what our gold-standard thinking should be to understand causation. We suggest that recognizing epidemiology as the quantitative heart of population health science can push these tensions aside and allow us to focus our science on the health of populations and on the processes that shape that health. Seeing epidemiology as the core quantitative health science has implications for the questions we ask, how we organize ourselves as a field, and how we train the next generation of epidemiologists.
流行病学长期以来一直致力于了解健康和疾病状态的原因，以便我们能够改善人群的健康。尽管我们对该领域的这一定义达成了广泛共识，但我们仍在继续争论流行病学的某些核心目标：流行病学是否是一门实用科学，哪些方法构成了流行病学方法，以及我们应该如何思考因果关系以达到黄金标准。我们认为，将流行病学视为人口健康科学的定量核心，可以消除这些紧张关系，使我们能够将科学重点放在人群健康及其塑造健康的过程上。将流行病学视为核心定量健康科学，对我们提出的问题、我们作为一个领域的组织方式以及我们如何培训下一代流行病学家都有影响。
