WEON, the annual meeting of the Netherlands Epidemiology Society

On Thursday June 11 and Friday June 12 the Netherlands Epidemiology Society held its annual meeting (WEON) at the congress center the Meervaart in Amsterdam. The EMGO Institute for Health and Care Research organised this year’s annual meeting. An organisation committee chaired by Dr. Caroline Terwee took care of the organisation. The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development and the Netherlands Cancer Society supported the WEON.
Caroline Terwee and her team decided to organise the program according to methodological issues instead of according to major diseases or health issues. Epidemiology encompasses a very multidisciplinary spectrum of contents, covering topics that can be organised according to disease (e.g. cardiovascular disease epidemiology, cancer epidemiology, infectious disease epidemiology, etc.) or according to risk factor (nutrition epidemiology) or according to setting (e.g. clinical epidemiology, social epidemiology), but it is the common methodology that units epidemiologists. This year’s WEON kicked off with a key note lecture by Dr. Dennis Revicki who informed us about the PROMIS project, with a strong focus on Item Response Theory as a means to realise efficient, and if necessary, tailored measurement in health surveys. The second part of the plenary opening session was a keynote debate between professors Jan Vandenbroucke (University Medical Center Leiden) and Bart Koes (Erasmus University Medical Center) about the merits and problems regarding the use of RCT research and observational research in striving towards evidence-based practice. Vandenbroucke argued that RCT’s are the gold standard for evaluation of therapy research, but are of much less (no?) use in discovery and explanation research, where observational designs are the way forward.
The 2009 WEON ended on Friday afternoon with two other key note debates, chaired by Dr. Lex Burdorf, on biological vs. statistical interaction (between Drs. Friedo Dekker and Mirjam Knol) and on the use and nonsense of power analyses (between profs. Jos Twisk and Martijn Berger). In between these two plenary sessions more than 90 posters and 60 orals were presented on themes such as validity of measurement instruments, screening research, diagnostic tests, prediction research, design issues, etc.