The Department of Epidemiology and Health Service Research is coordinated by Dr Sabrina Molinaro and operates within the Institute of Clinical Physiology, the largest biomedical centre of the National Research Council.
Our Department is formed by an interdisciplinary group of researchers and technologists with strong competences in social epidemiology.
What we do:
In our work we apply a multidisciplinary approach to epidemiological research, creating interconnections between our five core areas of expertise and clinical physiology: observational studies, data mining, outcome evaluation, pharmacology and toxicology, diagnosis and therapy.
Our main fields of work include epidemiological analysis for healthcare policy programming, epidemiological analysis to support social policies in Italy and across Europe, individual risk factor epidemiology for personalised medicine, and design and planning of methodological frameworks to support the technological development of Decision Support Systems.
Since 1995, the Department produces every year the ESPAD®Italy study (European School Survey Project on Alcohol and other Drugs) which investigates adolescent consumption of legal substances such as tobacco and alcohol, as well as drugs, doping, other psychotropic drugs and gambling in Italy through survey tools. ESPAD®Italy is carried out in the framework of the wider EU ESPAD project, the largest cross-national research project in the world that, bringing together more than forty countries, provides every four years updated and comparable data on adolescent substance use in Europe.
Thanks to this partnership, we actively collaborate with EMCDDA and the Council of Europe, placing our Institute amongst the main actors at European level for the monitoring of addictions in Italy.
Furthermore, the Department is author of the IPSAD study (Italian Population Survey on Alcohol and other Drugs), the first of its kind in Italy, which is published every two years since 2001 to monitor the consumption patterns of legal and illegal psychoactive substances of a representative sample of the Italian population aged 15-64.
Scientific evidence and prevalence estimates produced by our studies provide valuable information and constitute a fundamental resource both for the clinical research developed by our Institute and for the planning and evaluation of public health and social policy interventions by national, regional and local authorities.
Coordinator:
Sabrina Molinaro, Ph.D.
Epidemiology and Health Research Department
Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council IFC-CNR