Assignment 2

By: Hira Mehmood

Q) It has been hypothesized that good nutrition in infancy may be related to reduce risk of
heart disease in later life. A crucial aspect of nutrition in infancy is breast-feeding. The
department of health in your country would like to undertake a study to explore whether
breast fed infants have reduced risk of cardiovascular disease as adults and they have asked
you to design the study. Answer the following questions on the study you would conduct.

a. What are the aims and objectives of your study and the hypothesis you want to test?
Ans:
Aims & objectives: study to explore whether breast fed infants have reduced risk of
cardiovascular disease as adults
Hypothesis: Good nutrition in infancy may be related to reduce risk of heart disease in
later life

b. What type of study design would you choose? Justify your answer.
Ans. Prospective Cohort study

c. How you would select your study population and define and measure the exposure?
Ans: When proposing a prospective cohort study, the investigator first identifies the
characteristics of the group of people he/she wishes to study as in this example we will select
two groups of people, infants that are breastfed and infants that are not breastfed and then
observe them over time. Exposure status is determined at the beginning of the study.

d. How would you define the outcome and what methods would you use to measure the
outcome?
Ans: Measuring outcome
Outcome measures may be obtained from various sources like medical records or directly from
the participant. Note that the method used to ascertain outcome must be identical for both
exposed and unexposed groups.

e. What are the potential weaknesses and limitations of your study?

Ans:
 One major limitation of a prospective cohort design is that is time consuming and costly,
we may have to follow them up for many years before the outcome occurs, so loss to
follow-up may occur.
 Cohort studies may not be very efficient for rare outcomes except in some conditions.