Preventive medicine
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Preventive medicine · Oct 2011
Perception of environmental obstacles to commuting physical activity in Brazilian elderly.
To evaluate the association between perceived environmental attributes and commuting physical activity (PA) in a population-based sample of elderly persons. ⋯ Results showed that poor physical and social environmental characteristics were related to lower commuting. Building public facilities and promoting physical activity in groups are likely to impact in active commuting among the elderly in Brazil.
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Preventive medicine · Oct 2011
Historical ArticleCauses, risks, and probabilities: probabilistic concepts of causation in chronic disease epidemiology.
Identifying and understanding causes of disease is arguably the central aim of the discipline of epidemiology. However, while the discipline has matured over the past sixty years, developing a battery of quantitative tools and methods for data analysis, the discipline of epidemiology lacks an explicit, shared theoretical account of causation. Moreover, some epidemiologists exhibit discomfort with the concept of causation itself, concerned that it creates more confusion than clarity. ⋯ The epidemiologic evidence linking cigarette smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s provided a focus for debates over causation. While some epidemiologists embraced probabilistic concepts of cause and effect, others maintained that causal mechanisms must ultimately be deterministic. The tension between probabilistic risk factors and deterministic causal mechanisms continues to haunt epidemiology today.