Comprehensive Summary: Cross-Sectional Studies in Medical Research

This report summarizes a research paper that focuses on cross-sectional study designs, comparing them to cohort and case-control studies. The paper presents two case studies: one on antibiotic resistance in Propionibacterium acnes strains and another on HIV prevalence among male sex workers. The first case study highlights antibiotic sensitivities and the potential for changing results over time. The second case study assesses HIV prevalence and related risk factors, calculating Odds Ratios to identify vulnerable populations. The paper emphasizes the cost-effectiveness and speed of cross-sectional studies in establishing baselines for further research, while also acknowledging limitations such as the inability to establish causality and susceptibility to biases. The author concludes by emphasizing the utility of cross-sectional studies in measuring disease prevalence, Odds Ratios, and associations, making them valuable for deriving relationships between experimental groups.

Running Head: Summary
Summary of a case study
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Authors Note

1Summary of a case study
Introduction
The assignment focuses on summary of a research paper containing cross-sectional
study design. The study is based on prevalence of the disease in clinical practice samples.
The research paper focuses on the characteristics of a cross-sectional study and how cross-
sectional study is more effective than cohort and case-control study.
Discussion
Here the author of the paper has described two examples of the cross-sectional studies
in by two case studies. The first case study is focused on antibiotic resistance of
Propionibacterium acnes strains among the patients of the hospital in India. 80 patients who
were affected by acne vulgaris, were selected in the experiment. The researchers collected
different specimen of P. acnes from 52% of participants. Sensitivity of different antibiotics
such as erythromycin, clindamycin, and azithromycin on the specimen were comparatively
higher than the sensitivity to other antibiotics which are tetracycline, doxycycline,
minocycline, and levofloxacin (Sardana et al., 2016). According to the study, if the
experiments would have been performed after two or more years, the results would be
different. Other case study was based on the assessment of prevalence of HIV and risk factors
related to the male sex workers. The research paper has described that cross-sectional study
can be designed for assessing the population-based survey and used for analysing the clinical
prevalence of some studies which are based on the medical interventions. According to this
research paper cross sectional studies are effective for calculating Odds Ratio. According to
Shinde et al., (2009), 33% of male sex workers shows prevalence for HIV and male sex
workers are more prone to infection of HIV. The Odds Ratio is 3.5 which signifies that
transgendered people were more prone to infection rather than the males.

2Summary of a case study
The research paper states that the cross sectional studies are inexpensive and
relatively faster to retrieve results. This type of studies are focused on prevalence of a clinical
exposure and help in establishing the background for cohort studies (Setia, 2016). The
limitations of this research paper are also described in this research paper. Cross-sectional
studies are focused on one time measurement for outcome or exposure so that difficulties in
developing casual relationships from the outcomes of cross sectional analysis (Franchi et al.,
2018). Cross-sectional studies are prone to several biases which can be derived from an
experiment which is set up for assessment of obesity among 250 participants (Nakao et al.,
2018). The experiment results that the obese people are more likely to consume salads and
continue daily exercises. Therefore, one must be careful while interpreting the results from
cross-sectional surveys. According to the author of this paper, cross-sectional studies are not
sufficient to explain the disease trends in certain situations for an example, incidence of HIV
in a community might be decreased even after increasing the prevalence. However, the
example opposed the concept that states prevalence of a result depends on the occurrence of
disease.
Conclusion
The assignment is focused on effectiveness of cross-sectional study and states that this
type of study design helps to measure prevalence of diseases, Odds Ratio and associations.
The study designs are relevant in deriving the casual relationships in between two groups of
experiments.

3Summary of a case study
References
Franchi, Martino V., et al. "Muscle thickness correlates to muscle cross‐sectional area in the
assessment of strength training‐induced hypertrophy." Scandinavian journal of medicine &
science in sports 28.3 (2018): 846-853.
Nakao, Motoyuki, et al. "Prevalence and risk factors of airflow limitation in a Mongolian
population in Ulaanbaatar: Cross-sectional studies." PloS one 12.4 (2017).
Sardana, Kabir, et al. "Cross-sectional pilot study of antibiotic resistance in
Propionibacterium Acnes strains in Indian acne patients using 16S-RNA polymerase chain
reaction: a comparison among treatment modalities including antibiotics, benzoyl peroxide,
and isotretinoin." Indian journal of dermatology 61.1 (2016): 45.
Setia, Maninder Singh. "Methodology series module 3: Cross-sectional studies." Indian
journal of dermatology 61.3 (2016): 261.
Shinde, Santosh, et al. "Male sex workers: are we ignoring a risk group in Mumbai,
India?." Indian Journal of Dermatology, Venereology, and Leprology 75.1 (2009): 41.