A Comprehensive Review on Educational Epidemiology

One of the relatively modern branches in the knowledge of epidemiology, which despite being very important, very few articles have been published about it so far, is the branch of educational epidemiology. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to introduce the branch of educational epidemiology.

This study is a comprehensive review study in which, using the keywords: Education, Epidemiology, and Educational epidemiology, all the articles conducted in the field of educational epidemiology and indexed in Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were collected and analyzed.

The database search shows that until the writing of this article in January 2023, only five articles with the title of educational epidemiology have been written and all of them have been published in JAMA. The first article was published in September 2014 by Carney and colleagues. The other four articles are all commentaries written about the article by Carney and his colleagues.  Overall, it seems that educational epidemiology research is a challenging issue, because it is difficult to implement controlled interventions in educational environments. On the other hand, the strict accreditation requirements existing in educational institutions make it difficult to plan and implement educational interventions.

It seems that by using epidemiological studies, including descriptive and analytical ones in educational units, it is possible to better understand educational processes, educational issues and problems, as well as ways to deal with them.This helps to improve the level of health sciences eucation.