It is a tremendous honour for the course faculty to be offered the opportunity to transfer the course lectures and hands-on sessions into a series of papers on epidemiology subjects for Kidney International. The articles will explain epidemiological concepts at an introductory to intermediate level providing ample examples derived from current nephrology literature. The writing style will be simple and, as mathematical formulas may put off some readers the use of these formulas will be minimal and restricted to those cases where they are absolutely needed to make the basic learning points.
The series will cover subjects like measures of disease occurrence, measures of effect, study design, bias and confounding, survival analysis methods, analysis of interaction, ways to explore causality and a number of other themes. The papers will be further supported by additional educational material provided on the Kidney International website. The authors will include the course faculty, consisting of ERA-EDTA Registry Office staff (Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam), Registry Committee members and epidemiologists and biostatisticians from CNR Reggio Calabria (Italy) and Leiden University Medical Center (The Netherlands).
We hope you will like the series!

Carmine Zoccali, ERA-EDTA Registry Chairman and Kitty Jager, ERA-EDTA Registry Managing Director