Description

The course will focus on design of human nutrition studies, nutritional epidemiology, data handling and presentation, and protocol development. Through lectures, quizzes, exercises, R-tutorials and two group reports, the students will get an understanding of key terms, concepts and techniques, as well as skills and competences in 1) data analyses and presentation and 2) study design and protocol development.

 

Knowledge:

• Define epidemiology and causality.
• Describe the epidemiological measures of frequency and association.
• Define and explain the concepts bias, confounding, effect modification and chance.
• Define randomized controlled trials and other study designs and describe their advantages and limitations.
• Explain the principles of sample size, power and multiplicity.
• Describe the formal requirements and approvals needed for human studies, data protection, etc.

Skills:

• Be able to import and format a data set in R, run significance tests and multiple linear regression.
• Be able to assess for confounding and test for effect modification.
• Be able to discuss the complexities of designing a nutrition intervention.
• Be able to present key statistics in tables.
• Be able to calculate the sample size needed for a human study.
• Generate a random sequence based on variable block size.
• Be able to draft essential parts of a human study protocol based on current regulations and guidelines.

 

Competences:

• Be able to handle and analyse a data set in R and present data in tables and text.
• Be able to design a nutrition (intervention) study, based on a given research question, ie develop PICOTS and draft a short protocol.

Recommended qualifications

Academic qualifications equivalent to a BSc degree is required.

Basic knowledge in statistics is expected.