1976: The Year Epidemiology Became Miettinenian

The Department of Epidemiology Seminar Series

Speaker:

Alfredo Morabia, MD, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology, Barry Commoner Center, City University of New York and  Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

Abstract:

• Olli S. Miettinen (1936-2021) will be remembered as having provided the intellectual and conceptual groundwork that allowed epidemiologic methods to transition from an essentially observational discipline to an analytical one. The methodology for group comparisons he developed could be applied beyond public health, in areas such as clinical medicine and pharmacoepidemiology. These methods, which he referred to as “theoretical” epidemiology, were widely taught and formalized in articles and textbooks. In 1976 Olli Miettinen published a seminal article in the American Journal of Epidemiology that depicted his approach to risk/rates and study designs based on two variables, population, and time. The 1976 article comprised a graph symbolizing Olli Miettinen’s imprint on epidemiology. Miettinenian contribution on risk/rates, designs and biases was more foundational than that on causal concepts which, from 1986 on, became the focus of a new phase of epidemiology.