Article | REF: MED4001 V2

Spatial analysis for epidemiology and health geography

Author: Marc SOURIS

Publication date: December 10, 2023

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


Overview

Français

ABSTRACT

This article describes the principles and the different techniques of spatial analysis for epidemiology and health geography: mapping, analysis of heterogeneity and spatial continuity, trends, homogeneous areas, cluster detection, geometries, spatial-temporal analysis, etc. Spatial analysis is also used in the development of many applications: modelling of epidemics, warning systems, crisis management systems, risk prevention and analysis systems, vaccination campaigns, and surveys.

Read this article from a comprehensive knowledge base, updated and supplemented with articles reviewed by scientific committees.

Read the article

AUTHOR

  • Marc SOURIS: Emeritus Research Director - UMR "Emerging Viruses Unit", Aix-Marseille Univ. – IRD – INSERM, Marseille, France

 INTRODUCTION

Faced with the evidence of multiple transmissions of diseases from animals to humans, an integrated, systemic approach has gradually become essential to better understand, assess and prepare for health risks: it is necessary to study diseases in their global context, taking into account not only potential patients, but also all the players involved in the emergence and spread of diseases. There are many such players: pathogens, human and animal populations, vectors, with biological, geographical, environmental, behavioral, social, economic and other risk factors.

Heterogeneity is the key to epidemiology, in the sense that uniform risk in observed data does not allow epidemiological differences to be associated with factors that might have etiological significance. Heterogeneity also concerns the spatial distribution of diseases: health phenomena are rarely randomly distributed in space, and their spatial distribution often reflects risk factors linked to geographical factors and proximity relationships between individuals, which make it possible to decipher them. Many processes depend on proximity, either through contamination or contagion processes, or through geographical causal relationships with environmental characteristics. The study of heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of health phenomena therefore proves to be important in the analysis and understanding of these phenomena and the identification of their risk factors: when risk varies from one place to another, geographical location is an important explanatory variable, either because it reflects an element of risk determined by the environment (be it an element of the natural or sociocultural environment associated with a place), or because people with similar risk characteristics live together, or because risk is linked to a process of contagion by proximity.

This article introduces the conceptual and methodological foundations underpinning spatial analysis in epidemiology, whose various methods and tools will be described in detail in the associated article [MED 4 002] . The two-dimensional nature of geographical location means that standard representation methods and statistical techniques for dealing with essentially univariate sets of variables need to be supplemented by more sophisticated methods. The term "spatial analysis" is thus used to describe analysis techniques, essentially statistical, that make use of geographical location. Spatial analysis of a health phenomenon mainly consists in...

You do not have access to this resource.

Exclusive to subscribers. 97% yet to be discovered!

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference

A Comprehensive Knowledge Base, with over 1,200 authors and 100 scientific advisors
+ More than 10,000 articles and 1,000 how-to sheets, over 800 new or updated articles every year
From design to prototyping, right through to industrialization, the reference for securing the development of your industrial projects

This article is included in

Healthcare technologies

This offer includes:

Knowledge Base

Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees

Services

A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources

Practical Path

Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills

Doc & Quiz

Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading

Subscribe now!

Ongoing reading
Spatial analysis for epidemiology