Cross Sectional Study Epidemiology

Other cross sectional studies obtain data on the prevalence of exposure and the health outcome or disease for the purpose of examining the association of these two variables.

Cross sectional study epidemiology. A cross sectional study examines the relationship between disease or other health related state and other variables of interest as they exist in a defined population at a single point in time or over a short period of time e g. In this third type of observational study a sample of persons from a population is enrolled and their exposures and health outcomes are measured simultaneously. Researchers record the information that is present in a population but they do not manipulate variables.

There is no prospective or retrospective follow up. Cross sectional studies can contain individual level data one record per individual for example in national health surveys. Both the rr and the or can be calculated to describe the association between the exposure and the outcome.

However in modern epidemiology it may be impossible to survey the entire population of interest so cross sectional studies often involve secondary analysis of data collected for another purpose. The cross sectional study tends to assess the presence prevalence of the health outcome at that point of time without regard to duration. In a cross sectional study we extracted data on 40 morbidities from a database of 1 751 841 people registered with 314 medical practices in scotland as of march 2007.

The cross sectional study is an observational study that assesses exposure and the outcome at one specific point in time in a sample population. Cross sectional studies are observational in nature and are known as descriptive research not causal or relational meaning that you can t use them to determine the cause of something such as a disease. Some cross sectional studies characterize the prevalence of a health outcome or disease in a specified population in a defined period of time ie prevalence.

A cross sectional study also known as a cross sectional analysis transverse study prevalence study is a type of observational study that analyzes data from a population or a representative subset at a specific point in time. A cross sectional study is the simplest variety of descriptive or observational epidemiology that can be conducted on representative samples of a population.