How is the science of epidemiology helping to discover links between environmental exposures and diseases such as autism?
By studying how health outcomes are distributed across populations, epidemiologists learn what factors are likely to increase risk of disease. The two most common approaches for establishing that environmental factors contribute to causing a disease (such as ASD) are to contrast disease rates in a single population at different points in time and to compare disease rates at the same point in time across different populations (see Epidemiologic Approaches to Autism and the Environment by Craig J. Newschaffer, Ph.D.).
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