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A new avenue for epidemiology

Posted by alessandrogiuliani on 09 Nov 2017 at 08:43 GMT

I had many reasons to be deligthed to read this paper : the personal side is the satisfaction to have contributed to something potentially very useful for health when, many years ago together with my friends Joe and Chuck contributed to develop RQA. The more 'public' one is to had the occasion to observe to the birth of a possible great epistemological jump in epidemiology studies. This jump, in my opinion, is linked to two crucial points (both favored by RQA features):1. The focus on time: the cyclical character of environmental exposition to toxicants (as well as any other relevant biological function) has a quasi-periodic and hihly non-stationary behaviour. This fact, together with the lack of very long series, prevented to face the time dimension in epidemiological studies. This fact undermined the detection power of these studies for the 'leveling off' due to averaging across time.
2. The focus on individual temporal structure. The relevant scale at which temporal structures do appear is the individual level and focusing on INDIVIDUAL temporal pattern implies we put the analysis at the right scale, this in turn opens the way to a sort of 'biological statistical mechanics' in which general issues like 'the degree of order' or temporal determinism of the biological systema are studied as such without referring to particular microscopic level mechanisms.

Again Compliments

Alessandro Giuliani
Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma, Italia

No competing interests declared.
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RE: A new avenue for epidemiology

pcurtin replied to alessandrogiuliani on 11 Nov 2017 at 15:18 GMT

We thank Dr. Alessandro Giuliani for his comments on our study, which is the culmination of many years of effort in developing a biomarker to obtain highly temporally resolved time-series data, and to adapt mathematical methods that Dr. Giuliani and his colleagues have pioneered. We agree with Dr. Giuliani that to fully comprehend human physiology, and detect the deviation from normal physiology to disease, requires an understanding of the temporal dynamics of our biological systems. We are currently undertaking several studies contrasting these properties in healthy individuals with those suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders. We hope to share the results of those efforts with the scientific community in the coming months.

Paul Curtin and Manish Arora

No competing interests declared.
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