Spatial Epidemiology: Methods and Applications

Abstract

Epidemiologists are primarily interested in the occurrence of disease as categorized by time, person and place. Spatial epidemiology emphasizes the latter. It is concerned both with describing and understanding variations in disease from a distinctly analytical spatial perspective and as an area of medical research it is one of growing importance. This is the first major edited book on spatial epidemiology to be published in the past decade, providing a comprehensive reference on state-of-the-art methods and applications in this rapidly expanding discipline. The contributions reflect the inter-disciplinary and international nature of the field, with practitioners from public health, epidemiology, geography, statistics and environmental sciences. The book is organized into four sections. Section One introduces the field of spatial epidemiology and provides a thorough background on the data requirements with particular emphasis upon the problems and limitations associated with health event data and small area social statistics. The section highlights recent changes in access to spatially referenced data in the UK. Section Two contains six chapters that provide an account of stateof-the-art statistical methods for spatially modelling disease. The first chapter provides an overview of statistical methods for disease mapping and its relation to cluster detection which are then expanded upon in the rest of the section. A common theme is the use of statistical techniques to model the spatial structures inherent in small area statistical data. Statistical methodologies include geostatistical modelling for smoothing and summarizing spatial data and hierarchical modelling to account for spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity. These techniques have become increasingly important over the past decade and the section describes their application in detail. Section Three concerns disease mapping and clustering and links together the traditional aspects of epidemiology (mapping disease) with the sophisticated statistical techniques described in Section Two and data issues discussed in Section One. The section is particularly strong in illustrating international spatial epidemiology research. Section Four investigates the links between environmental exposure and health. Theoretical chapters are concerned with the processes and mechanisms by which human populations are exposed to environmental contaminants and how these can be measured and monitored whilst applications include traffic pollution, water quality and climate change.