Epidemiology is the study of how often a disease shows up in a group of people and what raises the odds of getting it. It's the science behind almost every claim about asbestos and mesothelioma, and it's the reason courts accept that exposure can cause harm decades later.
These terms explain how researchers actually measure that link. A cohort study follows exposed workers over time, while a case-control study starts with sick people and looks backward. Numbers like relative risk, the odds ratio, and the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) put a figure on how much exposure raises risk, and a confidence interval tells you how solid that figure is. Others, like the Kaplan-Meier curve and median overall survival, describe how long people live after diagnosis.
You'll also find the landmark studies cited in asbestos litigation, from the Quebec Chrysotile Mining Cohort to Seidman 1979 and Loomis 2009. Understanding a dose-response relationship or what confounding means can help you follow a medical report or an expert's testimony.
Every term below links to a full plain-language definition.
Terms in this category
- Background RateThe background rate is the number of cases of a disease that occur in a population in the absence of a specif…
- Berman-Crump Meta-AnalysisThe Berman-Crump meta-analysis refers to a series of influential statistical analyses by D. Wayne Berman and …
- Cancer RegistryA cancer registry is an organized system that collects information on every cancer diagnosed in a defined pop…
- Case-Control StudyA case-control study is a type of medical research that compares people who already have a disease (the "case…
- Chapel 2021Chapel 2021 refers to a peer-reviewed study by David J. Chapel and colleagues published in 2021 that examined…
- Cohort StudyA cohort study is a type of research that follows a defined group of people over time to see who develops a d…
- Concordance IndexThe concordance index (C-index) is a statistical measure of how well a prediction model ranks patients by the…
- confidence intervalA confidence interval is a range of values that scientists report alongside a single estimated number (like a…
- ConfoundingConfounding happens in a study when a third factor is linked to both the exposure being studied and the disea…
- Confounding by IndicationConfounding by indication is a bias in observational studies where the reason a person received a particular …
- Disease-Free SurvivalDisease-Free Survival (DFS) is the length of time after treatment during which a patient remains alive with n…
- Dose-response relationshipThe dose-response relationship is the scientific link between how much of a harmful substance a person was ex…
- EpidemiologyEpidemiology is the science of studying how diseases occur and spread in groups of people, and what factors c…
- EtiologyEtiology is the study of what causes a disease, the specific agents, exposures, or biological events that set…
- Exposure-Knowledge GradientThe exposure-knowledge gradient is the documented gap, across time and across different industries, between w…
- Fleischer-Drinker StudyThe Fleischer-Drinker Study was a 1946 industrial hygiene investigation of asbestos pipe-covering insulation …
- Hazard RatioA hazard ratio (HR) is a number from a statistical study that compares the rate at which an event, like devel…
- Healthy Worker EffectThe healthy worker effect is a bias in occupational studies: workers as a group tend to be healthier than the…
- Hodgson-Darnton 2000Hodgson-Darnton 2000 is a landmark quantitative risk assessment published by British researchers Julian Hodgs…
- IncidenceIncidence is the number of new cases of a disease that arise in a group of people over a set period, usually …
- intraperitoneal injection studyAn intraperitoneal injection study is an experimental method in which researchers inject test fibers (such as…
- Kaplan-Meier CurveA Kaplan-Meier curve is a graph that shows the proportion of a group of patients still surviving over time af…
- Loomis 2009Loomis 2009 refers to a landmark cohort study by Dana Loomis and colleagues that examined lung cancer mortali…
- Median Overall SurvivalMedian overall survival (mOS) is the length of time at which half of the patients in a study are still alive …
- Median SurvivalMedian survival is the length of time at which exactly half of a group of patients with a given disease are s…
- Mesothelioma ClusterA mesothelioma cluster is an unusually high number of mesothelioma cases occurring in a defined geographic ar…
- Meta-AnalysisA meta-analysis combines the results of many separate studies on the same question into a single overall esti…
- Mirabelli 2008Mirabelli 2008 refers to a study published by Dario Mirabelli and colleagues in Occupational and Environmenta…
- Multi-Institutional SeriesA multi-institutional series is a research study that combines patient data from several hospitals or cancer …
- Multivariate AnalysisMultivariate analysis is a group of statistical methods that examine the effect of several variables at the s…
- nested case-control studyA nested case-control study is a research design in which investigators take a large group of people who are …
- Odds RatioAn odds ratio (OR) is a number used in medical studies to compare how often a disease occurs in people with a…
- P-ValueA p-value is a number between 0 and 1 that tells how surprising a study's result would be if there were reall…
- Pleural Calcification PrevalencePleural calcification prevalence refers to how often calcified scarring is found on the pleura (the lining ar…
- Population Attributable Fraction (PAF)The population attributable fraction is the share of all cases of a disease in a population that would not ha…
- Population-Based Survival DataPopulation-based survival data are statistics describing how long groups of people diagnosed with a specific …
- PrevalencePrevalence is the share of a group of people who have a disease or condition at a particular time, counting b…
- Progression-Free SurvivalProgression-Free Survival (PFS) is the length of time during and after treatment that a patient lives with th…
- Proportional mortalityProportional mortality is an epidemiological measure that compares the share of deaths from a specific cause …
- Quebec Chrysotile Mining CohortThe Quebec Chrysotile Mining Cohort is a large group of workers from the chrysotile (white asbestos) mines an…
- rate ratioA rate ratio is a number that compares how often a disease occurs in one group versus another over a given ti…
- Recall BiasRecall bias is an error that arises when people with a disease remember or report their past exposures differ…
- Relative RiskRelative risk (RR) is the rate of a disease in a group exposed to something, such as asbestos, divided by the…
- Seidman 1979 StudyThe Seidman 1979 Study is a landmark epidemiological investigation by Dr. Herbert Seidman and colleagues that…
- Selection BiasSelection bias is a distortion in a study's results caused by how people were chosen for it, or by who droppe…
- Standardized Incidence Ratio (SIR)A standardized incidence ratio compares the number of new cancer cases actually seen in a group, such as a co…
- standardized mortality ratio (SMR)A standardized mortality ratio (SMR) compares the number of deaths actually observed in a group of people (su…
- Statistical SignificanceA result is called statistically significant when it would be unlikely to arise by chance alone if there were…
- Stayner 1996Stayner 1996 refers to an influential review paper by Leslie Stayner and colleagues at the U.S. National Inst…
- Systematic ReviewA systematic review is a structured summary of all the research on a defined question, using a written plan t…
- Welten 2022Welten 2022 refers to a Dutch occupational epidemiology study that provided updated risk estimates for mesoth…
Terms in this category
Browse the full Lexicon, or talk it through with a member of our litigation team, not a screener, at 833-4-ASBESTOS.