Determine whether the following is more closely related to i

Determine whether the following is more closely related to incidence or prevalence. Occurrence of acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) among participants during the first 10 years of follow-up of the Framingham Study.

1. Prevalence

2. Incidence

Also any explanation why would be great

Solution

Incidence is a measure of the probability of occurrence of a given medical condition in a population within a specified period of time. Although sometimes loosely expressed simply as the number of new cases during some time period, it is better expressed as a proportion or a rate with a denominator.

Prevalence in epidemiology is the proportion of a population found to have a condition (typically a disease or a risk factor such as smoking or seat-belt use). It is arrived at by comparing the number of people found to have the condition with the total number of people studied, and is usually expressed as a fraction, as a percentage or as the number of cases per 10,000 or 100,000 people.

So Occurrence of acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) among participants during the first 10 years of follow-up of the Framingham Study is more closely to incidence. That is

Incidence – Here we are interested in the number of new cases that occur during the follow-up.