Epidemiology and Genetic Epidemiology

This chapter focuses on descriptive analysis in genetic epidemiology and some of its links with mainstream epidemiology. It starts with incidence and prevalence, briefly reviewing some of the relevant statistical methods, and then moves on to consider the analysis of correlated responses in mainstream epidemiology. The core of the chapter describes methods used in descriptive analysis in genetic epidemiology. These methods are primarily used to describe and draw inferences about the structure of phenotypic dependencies within families. The appropriate focus of traditional descriptive epidemiology on representative sampling frames and high response rates is paralleled by the equal importance of sampling schemes in descriptive genetic epidemiology and a full section is therefore devoted to non-random ascertainment.