Computer simulation models have been used in health research since the 1960s. Typical applications include hospital scheduling, spread of communicable diseases, effectiveness of screening programs, and economic evaluation. Most of the models have been macrosimulation models, which operate at the level of groups or systems. In contrast, microsimulation models simulate the behavior and generate the life histories of individual units, such as persons or household. Microsimulation models have been built primarily to evaluate the implications of social and economic policies, for example, income tax, social security, health benefits, and pension policies.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in the development of population-based microsimulation models to project future distributions of health determinants and diseases in the population, estimate the contribution of different factors to changes in disease incidence, prevalence, and mortality, and predict the effects of disease prevention and treatment strategies on health outcomes. Development of such models has been facilitated by the increasing power and decreasing cost of computing infrastructure, combined with the growing availability of population health data. Examples include several cancer models developed by the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET) in the USA, the multidisease Population Health Model (POHEM) in Canada, or SimObesity, a spatial microsimulation model of obesogenic environments in the UK.

We invite investigators to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate the continuing efforts to develop and validate health-related microsimulation models and use such models to address current health research and policy issues. We are interested in all applications of microsimulation models in the context of population health, including both communicable and noncommunicable diseases as well as model development and methodological research. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Population-health applications of microsimulation models
  • Projections of risk factor distribution in the population
  • Burden of disease and attributable burden studies
  • Assessment of disease prevention strategies
  • Evaluation of population health policies
  • Modeling and control of epidemics
  • Other applications of microsimulation models
• Development of new health-related microsimulation models
• Validation and calibration of microsimulation models
• Methodological advances in microsimulation

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