As in previous courses, lectures and practical hands-on-sessions this course provided an insight into clinical epidemiology, covering subjects like measures of disease frequency, the advantages and disadvantages of different study designs, causal effects, data analysis, bias and confounding, stratification and multivariate analysis, prediction and correction for confounding, and survival analysis using Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression analysis.

Members of the ERA-EDTA Registry committee, including nephrologists who are experienced in epidemiological research, together with epidemiologists and medical information scientists from the ERA-EDTA Registry office in the Dept. of Medical Informatics at the AMC in Amsterdam and from Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), made an effort to relate epidemiological theory to examples from nephrology.

The idea behind the course is to provide participants with the opportunity to apply their newly gained knowledge directly into practice. The majority of the lectures are therefore followed by hands-on sessions. The hands-on sessions took the form of lively discussions between lecturers and students, of exercises on paper, and, last but not least, of SPSS practicals to provide training on how to use statistical computer programmes for data analysis. This time we were able to use the computers in a nearby school.

As far as the social programme was concerned we visited the beautiful city centre of Salzburg by night, had a guided tour through the Residenz and enjoyed a beautiful organ concert in the Franziskanerchurch. Also this ERA-EDTA course was very well evaluated by all participants. On behalf of them I would like to thank our host Dr. Reinhard Kramar, who did a perfect job as our local organizer and I would also like to express our gratitude to both ERA-EDTA and Ortho-Biotech for their continuing support of these kinds of educational activities.