The development laid out by UC San Diego School of Medicine professor Raphael Cuomo details what supports people in living longer after illness.
A UC San Diego School of Medicine professor has introduced a new branch of science he coins survival epidemiology and hopes the advancement will lead to new cures, more effective treatments and better approaches for numerous deadly and debilitating diseases.
Survival epidemiology is devoted to helping people live longer after an illness, said Raphael Cuomo, PhD, who published a scientific paper about the new field in December in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.
This is an important development, he said, “because we currently don’t have a field of medical science dedicated to the study of patient outcomes after they have a diagnosis.”
Currently, medicine is designed to treat patients singly, ensuring each patient has the appropriate diagnosis and appropriate treatment, but there is not “a systematic science dedicated to determining what is healthiest after diagnosis,” Cuomo said.
Epidemiology is adjacent to that aim, he said, though classic epidemiology is focused on prevention, while another field, clinical epidemiology, “answers clinically relevant questions [but] is not focused on the post-diagnosis period.”
Survival epidemiology, then, is needed to assess risk factors for bad outcomes among people who are sick, learning from those patients who are treated one by one.
The new field goes beyond a simple prognosis – an estimate of patient recovery based on variables like severity of disease – to specific factors that can either extend life or threaten survival.
These factors, outlined in Cuomo’s earlier work on a new phenomenon called “Cuomo’s paradox,” are often simultaneously good and bad for health, depending upon a person’s state of illness or wellness.
Survival epidemiology “focuses on the tools that will assess very clinically relevant patterns,” Cuomo said, using those patterns to detect nuances in the post-diagnosis period and leveraging that information for future training.
With high hopes for the development of this new branch of medicine, Cuomo believes resulting advice will be tailored to patients with a specific disease and disseminated in medical schools’ epidemiology curricula and spread to regulatory bodies and health research funding bodies.
Integrating survival epidemiology into the world of medical science will lead to improved scientific activity and stronger research moving forward, he said.
“I’m very proud of … being called the father of survival epidemiology,” he said, adding he is a “huge proponent of the idea of this field and post-diagnosis-specific science, doing what I can to advocate for … a better approach to evidence that helps people who are sick.”
