The role of descriptive epidemiology in nursing science is very important as it helps to provide information that can be used by nurses to prevent the spread of disease, develop effective interventions, and engage in further research. A descriptive epidemiologic study is one that examines a specific population and identifies the amount and distribution of health and design within that population (Giroux, 2015). Descriptive epidemiology looks at variables, such as person, place and time—variables that affect the incidence of disease. Race, sex, age, socioeconomic status, geography, environment, and patterns of appearance are all factors that descriptive epidemiology will consider when attempting to classify a disease’s occurrence (Hsu, Araneta, Kanaya, Chiang & Fujimoto, 2015). The role of descriptive epidemiology in nursing is thus situated in the idea that it provides education, information, and a pathway to strategies for helping patients and preventing the spread of disease (Saggu, Rehman, Abbas & Ansari, 2015). This paper will provide a contemporary example of how a descriptive epidemiology is applied in public health nursing and identify the components used to analyze at-risk populations. For this paper, the chosen focus is diabetes among Asian-Americans.
Descriptive epidemiology is applied in public health nursing by addressing the 1) who, 2) what, 3) where and 4) when questions associated with disease among a certain population. For example, in contemporary medicine, understanding the spread of diabetes among specific populations helps nurses in the public health nursing sector to better know how to treat patients who are part of this population. Among Asian-Americans, Nguyen, Nguyen, Taylor-Fischer and Tran (2015) report that the problem of diabetes is increasing and this population...
The problem with understanding the rate of incidence among this population, however, is exacerbated by the fact that Asian-American is itself a broad label that can be more effectively broken down into strict ethno-labels—i.e., Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and so on. Each group presents its own unique set of data. The Diabetes Prevention Program has undertaken the initiative to collect and analyze data from the various Asian-American population segments in hopes of providing nurses and health care providers with better information on incidence, health, risks, and possible interventions and preventive approaches to help this population reduce the threat of diabetes affecting their lives (Nguyen et al., 2015). In order to control and mitigate the negative effects of diabetes among Asian-Americans, descriptive epidemiology has been used to provide this information.
For the Asian-American population, it was long believed (wrongly) that diabetes would not be a major problem because of “the notion that Asian Americans are self-sufficient, well-educated, and have lower burdens of disease” (Nguyen et al., 2015, p. 544). However, this myth was proved incorrect thanks to descriptive epidemiologic studies that showed nearly 10% of all Asian-Americans are actually impacted by diabetes. At the same time, by aggregating the data among various ethno-groups, from Filipino-Americans to Japanese-Americans to Chinese-Americans and so on, researchers were masking the real disease burden among high risk groups and inflating the burden among low risk groups within that population (Nguyen et al., 2015). In other words, some Asian-American groups were actually more at risk for…
