Medical statistics

Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics to medicine and the health sciences, including epidemiology, public health, forensic medicine, and clinical research. Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the United Kingdom for more than 40 years but the term has not come into general use in North America, where the wider term 'biostatistics' is more commonly used.^[1] However, "biostatistics" more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to biology.^[1] Medical Statistics are a sub discipline of Statistics. "It is the science of summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data in medical practice, and using them to estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses. It has a central role in medical investigations. It not only provides a way of organizing information on a wider and more formal basis than relying on the exchange of anecdotes and personal experience, but also takes into account the intrinsic variation inherent in most biological processes." ^[2]

Pharmaceutical statistics

Pharmaceutical statistics is the application of statistics to matters concerning the pharmaceutical industry. This can be from issues of design of experiments, to analysis of drug trials, to issues of commercialization of a medicine.

There are many professional bodies concerned with this field including:

• European Federation of Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry (EFSPI)
• Statisticians In The Pharmaceutical Industry (PSI)

There are also journals including:

• Statistics in Medicine
• Pharmaceutical Statistics

Basic concepts

For describing situations

• Incidence (epidemiology) vs. Prevalence vs. Cumulative incidence
• all types of medical test results can be true positive or false positive and true negative or false negative...these categories are hugely dependent on the prevalence of the disease being tested for; and, for example, a false positive test result is more likely when the prevalence of the disease being tested for is very low (such as a lab test for cold-weather influenza being done in June in South Carolina, USA. and giving a "positive" result).
• Transmission rate vs. Force of infection
• Mortality rate vs. Standardized mortality ratio vs. Age-standardized mortality rate
• Pandemic vs. Epidemic vs. Endemic vs. Syndemic
• Serial interval vs. Incubation period
• Cancer cluster
• Sexual network
• Years of potential life lost
• Maternal mortality rate
• Perinatal mortality rate
• Low Birth weight ratio

For assessing the effectiveness of an intervention

• Absolute risk reduction
• Control event rate
• Experimental event rate
• Number needed to harm
• Number needed to treat
• Odds ratio
• Relative risk reduction
• Relative risk
• Relative survival
• Minimal clinically important difference

Related statistical theory

• Survival analysis
• Proportional hazards models
• Active control trials: Clinical trials in which a kind of new treatment is compared with some other active agent rather than a placebo.
• ADLS(Activities of daily living scale): It is a scale designed to measure physical ability/disability that is used in investigations of a variety of chronic disabling conditions, such as arthritis. This scale is based on scoring responses to questions about self-care, grooming, etc.^[3]
• Actuarial statistics: The statistics used by actuaries to calculate liabilities, evaluate risks and plan the financial course of insurance, pensions, etc.^[4]

See also

• Herd immunity
• False positives and false negatives
• Rare disease
• Hilda Mary Woods - the first author (with William Russell) of the first British textbook of medical statistics, published in 1931

References

Further reading

• Altman, D.G. (1991), Practical Statistics for Medical Research, CRC Press, ISBN 978-0-412-27630-9 
• Armitage, P.; Berry, G.; Matthews, J.N.S. (2002), Statistical Methods in Medical Research, Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-632-05257-8 
• Bland, J. Martin (2000), An Introduction to Medical Statistics (3rd ed.), Oxford: OUP, ISBN 978-0-19-263269-2 
• Kirkwood, B.R.; Sterne, J.A.C. (2003), Essential Medical Statistics (2nd ed.), Blackwell, ISBN 978-0-86542-871-3 
• Petrie, Aviva; Sabin, Caroline (2005), Medical Statistics at a Glance (2nd ed.), WileyBlackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-2780-6  Cite uses deprecated parameter |coauthors= (help)
• Onwude, Joseph (2008), Learn Medical Statistics (2nd ed.), DesignsOnline.co.uk 

External links

• Health-EU Portal EU health statistics