Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics to

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, and Health promotion ...

and the health sciences, including

epidemiology Epidemiology is the study and analysis of the distribution (who, when, and where), patterns and determinants of health and disease conditions in a defined population. It is a cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evide ...

public health Public health is "the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private, communities and individuals". Analyzing the det ...

, forensic medicine, and

clinical research Clinical research is a branch of healthcare science that determines the safety and effectiveness ( efficacy) of medications, devices, diagnostic products and treatment regimens intended for human use. These may be used for prevention, treat ...

. 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 Biostatistics (also known as biometry) are the development and application of statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experime ...

' is more commonly used.Dodge, Y. (2003) ''The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms'', OUP. However, "biostatistics" more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditar ...

. Medical statistics is a subdiscipline 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."

Pharmaceutical statistics

Pharmaceutical statistics is the application of statistics to matters concerning the

pharmaceutical industry The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, Vaccine, vaccinate them, or alleviate s ...

. This can be from issues of

design of experiments The design of experiments (DOE, DOX, or experimental design) is the design of any task that aims to describe and explain the variation of information under conditions that are hypothesized to reflect the variation. The term is generally associ ...

, 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 ''Pharmaceutical Statistics'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes papers related to pharmaceutical statistics. It is the official journal of Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry and is published by John Wiley & Sons. Abst ...

Clinical biostatistics

Clinical biostatistics is concerned with research into the principles and methodology used in the design and analysis of

and to apply statistical theory to clinical medicine. There is a society for Clinical Biostatistics with annual conferences since its founding in 1978. Clinical Biostatistics is taught in

postgraduate Postgraduate or graduate education refers to academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications pursued by post-secondary students who have earned an undergraduate ( bachelor's) degree. The organization and str ...

biostatistical and applied statistical degrees, for example as part of the BCA Master of Biostatistics program in Australia.

Basic concepts

;For describing situations *

Incidence (epidemiology) In epidemiology, incidence is a measure of the probability of occurrence of a given medical condition in a population within a specified period of time. Although sometimes loosely expressed simply as the number of new cases during some time p ...

vs. Prevalence vs. Cumulative incidence *Many medical tests (such as pregnancy tests) have two possible results: positive or negative. However, tests will sometimes yield incorrect results in the form of false positives or false negatives. False positives and false negatives can be described by the statistical concepts of

type I and type II errors In statistical hypothesis testing, a type I error is the mistaken rejection of an actually true null hypothesis (also known as a "false positive" finding or conclusion; example: "an innocent person is convicted"), while a type II error is the fa ...

, respectively, where the

null hypothesis In scientific research, the null hypothesis (often denoted ''H''0) is the claim that no difference or relationship exists between two sets of data or variables being analyzed. The null hypothesis is that any experimentally observed difference is d ...

is that the patient will test negative. The precision of a medical test is usually calculated in the form of positive predictive values (PPVs) and negative predicted values (NPVs). PPVs and NPVs of medical tests depend on intrinsic properties of the test as well as the prevalence of the condition being tested for. For example, if any pregnancy test was administered to a population of individuals who were biologically incapable of becoming pregnant, then the test's PPV will be 0% and its NPV will be 100% simply because true positives and false negatives cannot exist in this population. * Transmission rate vs. force of infection *

Mortality rate Mortality rate, or death rate, is a measure of the number of deaths (in general, or due to a specific cause) in a particular population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit of time. Mortality rate is typically expressed in units of d ...

vs. standardized mortality ratio vs.

age-standardized mortality rate In epidemiology and demography, age adjustment, also called age standardization, is a technique used to allow statistical populations to be compared when the age profiles of the populations are quite different. Example For example, in 2004/5, two ...

Pandemic A pandemic () is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of i ...

vs.

epidemic An epidemic (from Greek ἐπί ''epi'' "upon or above" and δῆμος ''demos'' "people") is the rapid spread of disease to a large number of patients among a given population within an area in a short period of time. Epidemics of infectious d ...

vs.

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found els ...

vs. syndemic *

Serial interval The serial interval in the epidemiology of communicable (infectious) diseases is the time between successive cases in a chain of transmission. The serial interval is generally estimated from the interval between clinical onsets (if observable), in ...

vs.

incubation period Incubation period (also known as the latent period or latency period) is the time elapsed between exposure to a pathogenic organism, a chemical, or radiation, and when symptoms and signs are first apparent. In a typical infectious disease, the in ...

Cancer cluster A cancer cluster is a disease cluster in which a high number of cancer cases occurs in a group of people in a particular geographic area over a limited period of time.

* Sexual network * Years of potential life lost * Maternal mortality rate *

Perinatal mortality rate Perinatal mortality (PNM) refers to the death of a fetus or neonate and is the basis to calculate the perinatal mortality rate. Variations in the precise definition of the perinatal mortality exist, specifically concerning the issue of inclusion o ...

* Low birth weight ratio ;For assessing the effectiveness of an intervention: *

Absolute risk reduction The risk difference (RD), excess risk, or attributable risk is the difference between the risk of an outcome in the exposed group and the unexposed group. It is computed as I_e - I_u, where I_eis the incidence in the exposed group, and I_u is the ...

Control event rate In epidemiology and biostatistics, the experimental event rate (EER) is a measure of how often a particular statistical event (such as response to a drug, adverse event or death) occurs within the experimental group (non-control group) of an experim ...

* 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): 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. * Actuarial statistics: the statistics used by actuaries to calculate liabilities, evaluate risks and plan the financial course of insurance, pensions, etc.

References

External links

Health-EU Portal
EU health statistics {{DEFAULTSORT:Medical Statistics Biostatistics Medical specialties Applied statistics Pharmaceutical statistics Clinical research