Rise of anti-science rhetoric has fundamentally changed the relationship between doctors and patients “The rise of anti-science and anti-vaccine rhetoric has fundamentally changed the relationship between clinicians and patients.”

"Over the past few years, the rise of anti-science and anti-vaccine rhetoric has fundamentally changed the relationship between clinicians and patients. It has made routine preventive care feel like walking into an ideological minefield." #PopHealthLab #evidence www.statnews.com/2025/12/10/a...

Reinforce Population Health Sciences for Evidence-Based Public Health

Kennedy is wrong, for sure, but how to resist⁉️ "To uphold a truly evidence-based public health, we must re-enchant and reinforce independent scientific institutions capable of generating valid expertise grounded in population health sciences." #PopHealthLab
www.bmj.com/content/390/...

📢 And so it begins!

Wishing all delegates at #SLLS2025 an enjoyable three days at the University of Fribourg #PopHealthLab

Many thanks to the event sponsors: #Centre_LIVES
@clscohorts.bsky.social @popres-uk.bsky.social

www.sllsconference.com

Starting off #SLLS2025 with a welcome from President Dale Dannefer here at the University of Fribourg #PopHealthLab

@sllshome.bsky.social

The Impact of Definitions of Disease on Overdiagnosis This Viewpoint discusses the global challenge of defining diseases and the need to balance broader access to medical treatment with avoidance of harmful medicaliziation and inefficient resource use.

"Continuously expanding disease criteria can reduce underdiagnosis and increase appropriate care, but often risk overdiagnosis, resulting in overtreatment and low-value care, ultimately threatening health care sustainability." #PopHealthLab
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Confusion between population risk prediction and individual disease Riley and colleagues discuss the importance of presenting the uncertainty around risk estimates provided by clinical prediction models.1 They describe how uncertainty and bias can be caused by poor me...

Risk prediction is made at a group level - not at an individual level 🤔 It seems evident but the confusion is pervasive 😱 and stems from the conflation between risk and disease #PopHealthLab
www.bmj.com/content/389/...

Screen no matter the risk? The systematic review by Naomi Tan and colleagues published in The Lancet Public Health (February issue) on the perceptions of personalised risk-based cancer screening reflects a growing trend in the ...

#Cancer screening ▶️ a whole-population or a risk-based approach⁉️ If risk-based, can you convince the "low-risk" strata to do less⁉️ #prevention #PopHealthLab @thelancetph.bsky.social @drotte.medsky.social @cancerresearchuk.org @vickersbiostats.bsky.social
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

What is Your Estimand? Defining the Target Quantity Connects Statistical Evidence to Theory | Brandon Stewart

Three thinks to do in quantitative population health studies (1) set a theoretical estimand, (2) link it to an empirical estimand, and (3) learn from data. You want to know more⁉️ Read this fantastic review #PopHealthLab
bstewart.scholar.princeton.edu/publications...

Monitoring Is Not Enough | AJPH | Vol. 115 Issue 5 American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA)

Public health surveillance or monitoring⁉️ What is clear is that we need both more than ever for evidence-based decision💪 #PopHealthLab @amjpublichealth.bsky.social @alfredomorabia.bsky.social @eupha.bsky.social @drtomfrieden.bsky.social
ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2...

Data Are Not Enough to Reimagine Public Health | AJPH | Vol. 110 Issue 11 American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA)

"At the heart of the problem is the confusion between public health surveillance and health data science" #PopHealthLab @alfredomorabia.bsky.social
ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/...

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden: Cuts to the agency will cost American lives and dollars The Office on Smoking and Health, the Environmental Health Laboratory, CDC Communications offices — the gutting of these teams will make America sicker, writes former CDC Director Tom Frieden.

"Public health is often invisible — until it fails. Without these programs, there will be more outbreaks, more tobacco-related illnesses, and more Americans dying unnecessarily." 🙈🤯 @drtomfrieden.bsky.social @alfredomorabia.bsky.social #PopHealthLab
www.statnews.com/2025/04/01/c...

Worldwide and time trends in sodium and potassium intakes in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis Background High sodium (Na) and low potassium (K) intakes in childhood have health effects across the life course. The objective was to estimate global, regional and national Na and K intakes in child...

"Globally, children’s Na intake was too high, while K intake was too low. Data were lacking in many countries. Interventions are needed to reduce Na and increase K from childhood, and monitoring should be improved" @drtomfrieden.bsky.social #PopHealthLab
nutrition.bmj.com/content/earl...

Major improvements in population are too often underappreciated 🙈 #progress Check here the major decline in the age-specific prevalence of dementia ✅️💪 #PopHealthLab @drtomfrieden.bsky.social @cwolfs1.bsky.social @eupha.bsky.social @alfredomorabia.bsky.social

Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to notice more of them.

Prevalence induced concept change explains why "people whose job is to find and eliminate problems in the world often cannot tell when their work is done" 🙈 Key issue in public health‼️ #PopHealthLab #PopulationHealth #surveillance
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Confusion between population-risk prediction and individual disease

How to predict risk⁉️ Well, do your best but acknowledge😎 uncertainties and remember that what you know at a group level is not bluntly applicable to one individual @bmj.com @societyforepi.bsky.social @eupha.bsky.social @richarddriley.bsky.social ✅️
#PopHealthLab
www.bmj.com/content/388/...

Yes, We Can—A Cure for Public Health Catastrophism

Read, learn, and teach because "rational thinking is the real driving force that underlies the institutional and technological changes [...] leading eventually to population-wide health improvement" #PopHealthLab @alfredomorabia.bsky.social @eupha.bsky.social
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Life course epidemiology and public health Life course epidemiology aims to study the effect of exposures on health outcomes across the life course from a social, behavioural, and biological perspective. In this Review, we describe how life co...

Life course #epidemiology has changed the way we understand the causes of chronic diseases 😎 Do you want to know more⁉️ Read this review in @thelancetph.bsky.social @rosevdlinden.bsky.social @stephane-cullati.bsky.social @cristianmeli.bsky.social #PopHealthLab
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Does Healthcare Deliver? For far too long, we have lacked meaningful insights into people’s experiences of healthcare and their health outcomes. The Patient-Reported Indicator Surveys (PaRIS) is a groundbreaking OECD initiati...

Very informative 👍 report on our healthcare systems 🇨🇭🇨🇦🇪🇺 #PROMs #qualityofcare #VBHC #PopHealthLab #monitoring #surveillance @stephane-cullati.bsky.social @eupha.bsky.social
www.oecd.org/en/publicati...

A "full adoption of a quantitative causal framework by social epidemiologists helps sharpen our focus on what matters most to improve the health of populations" #PopHealthLab via @miguelhernan.org

Win-Win: Reconciling Social Epidemiology and Causal Inference Abstract. Social epidemiology is concerned with the health effects of forces that are “above the skin.” Although causal inference should be a key goal for

"Quantitative causal inference in social epidemiology is an opportunity to do better science that matters, a win-win for both fields." #PopHealthLab @miguelhernan.org @epiellie.bsky.social @pwgtennant.bsky.social @cristianmeli.bsky.social @societyforepi.bsky.social
academic.oup.com/aje/article/...

The Value of Academic Health Research In the past month, the academic health research community in the US has been rocked by the new administration’s efforts to curtail health research expenditures. In the form of “Supplemental Guidance t...

"The true value of academic health research lies in the ineffable foundational role it plays in enabling a country to thrive and grow" @drtomfrieden.bsky.social @societyforepi.bsky.social @eupha.bsky.social #PopHealthLab #PopulationHealth #PublicHealth
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Causation and Causal Inference in Epidemiology | AJPH | Vol. 95 Issue S1 Concepts of cause and causal inference are largely self-taught from early learning experiences. A model of causation that describes causes in terms of sufficient causes and their component causes illu...

In the endless cyle of conjecture and refutation, a powerfull framework for consequential #epidemiology, "causal inferences cannot attain the certainty of logical deductions" by K.Rothman✅️ @societyforepi.bsky.social @epiellie.bsky.social #PopHealthLab
ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10....

SLLS Annual Conference 2025 Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies (SLLS) Annual Conference 2025 SAVE THE DATE: 8 – 10 SEPTEMBER 2025 (post-conference workshops on 11 September 2025) Location:…

Society for Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies (SLLS) Annual Conference
8 – 10 Sep 2025

University of Fribourg, Switzerland 🇨🇭 #PopHealthLab

“Life Course Transitions and Patterns: Stronger Evidence for Better Policies“ @sllshome.bsky.social
projects.unifr.ch/pophealthlab...

Free speech, fact checking, and the right to accurate information True to his campaign promises, on 20 January 2025, US President Donald Trump signed a broad range of Executive Orders, the scope of which ranged from renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” t...

#infodemic How to fight misinformation⁉️ "There is a large body of evidence suggesting that fact checking is effective"✅️ "Fact checking is not censorship. It is counterspeech"✅️ #PopHealthLab @scinews.bsky.social @drtomfrieden.bsky.social @unbiasedscipod.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Just a moment... Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

"choosing between a common-effect and random-effects model should mainly rely upon authors' consideration of whether studies are similar enough on all aspects that could importantly modify the magnitude of intervention effect" #PopHealthLab #EBPH
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Care, cure, and, if possible, prevent In their Lecture, Victor J Dzau and colleagues1 state, “To meet current needs of health and health care, medicine will require more health workers who are community and population health oriented and ...

Indeed and "Expanding the societal tasks of health-care providers is attractive, but care and cure of individual patients should remain their core tasks" ▶️ www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... @drotte.medsky.social @drtomfrieden.bsky.social #PopHealthLab

Without #data, there is no evidence-based public health #EBPH 😰 These institutions should be more independant from the state to protect them of such top-down stupid decisions #PopHealthLab @drtomfrieden.bsky.social @societyforepi.bsky.social @harvardepi.bsky.social @lshtm.bsky.social

Designing Surveillance at a Population Level | AJPH | Vol. 113 Issue 11 American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) from the American Public Health Association (APHA)

"How can we build more robust and efficient surveillance systems for future outbreak preparedness and response?" #PopHealthLab #populationhealth #monitoring @societyforepi.bsky.social 😎👍
ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/...

Slow data public health - European Journal of Epidemiology Surveillance and research data, despite their massive production, often fail to inform evidence-based and rigorous data-driven health decision-making. In the age of infodemic, as revealed by the COVID...

#surveillance #populationhealth #monitoring Too much data⁉️ Time for a slow data public health ✅️ #PopHealthLab 🇨🇭 @eupha.bsky.social @societyforepi.bsky.social
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Sacrificing patient care for prevention: distortion of the role of general practice Expansion of preventive clinical recommendations in primary care has had the unintended consequence of destabilising this foundation of the healthcare system, argue Minna Johansson and colleagues Fo...

#prevention "Expansion of preventive clinical recommendations in primary care has had the unintended consequence of destabilising this foundation of the healthcare system" #PublicHealth #PopHealthLab @drotte.medsky.social @drtomfrieden.bsky.social @ecdc.europa.eu
www.bmj.com/content/388/...