Medical statistics deals with applications of statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

 to medicine

Medicine

Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

 and the health sciences, including epidemiology

Epidemiology

Epidemiology is the study of health-event, health-characteristic, or health-determinant patterns in a population. It is the cornerstone method of public health research, and helps inform policy decisions and evidence-based medicine by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive...

, public health

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" . It is concerned with threats to health based on population health...

, forensic medicine, and clinical research

Clinical research

Clinical research is a branch of medical science that determines the safety and effectiveness of medications, devices, diagnostic products and treatment regimens intended for human use...

. Medical statistics has been a recognized branch of statistics in the UK for more than 40 years but the term does not appear to have come into general use in North America, where the wider term 'biostatistics

Biostatistics

Biostatistics is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology...

' is more commonly used. However, "biostatistics" more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

.

Constantly newer and newer statistical ratios are being developed to help measure the changing Patterns of various disease and health conditions. Addition of HIV health indicators, counting radiation doses, forensic criminal investigation ratios are among the new ones. As such Medical Statistics remains a constantly changing field.

Pharmaceutical statistics

Pharmaceutical statistics is the application of statistics to matters concerning the pharmaceutical industry. This can be from issues of design of experiments

Design of experiments

In general usage, design of experiments or experimental design is the design of any information-gathering exercises where variation is present, whether under the full control of the experimenter or not. However, in statistics, these terms are usually used for controlled 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
  Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry
  Statisticians in the Pharmaceutical Industry, abbreviated to PSI, is an organisation for the promotion of statistical thinking in order to improve the quality of research and development in the pharmaceutical industry....
  
   (PSI)

There are also journals including:

• Statistics in Medicine
  Statistics in Medicine (journal)
  Statistics in Medicine is a peer-reviewed statistics journal published by Wiley.Established in 1982, the journal publishes articles on medical statistics.The journal is indexed by Mathematical Reviews and SCOPUS....
  
  
• Pharmaceutical Statistics
  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....
  
  

Basic concepts

For describing situations

• Incidence (epidemiology)
  Incidence (epidemiology)
  Incidence is a measure of the risk of developing some new condition within a specified period of time. Although sometimes loosely expressed simply as the number of new cases during some time period, it is better expressed as a proportion or a rate with a denominator.Incidence proportion is the...
  
   vs. Prevalence
  Prevalence
  In epidemiology, the prevalence of a health-related state in a statistical population is defined as the total number of cases of the risk factor in the population at a given time, or the total number of cases in the population, divided by the number of individuals in the population...
  
   vs. Cumulative incidence
  Cumulative incidence
  Cumulative incidence or incidence proportion is a measure of frequency, as in epidemiology, where it is a measure of disease frequency during a period of time...
  
  
• Transmission rate
  Transmission risks and rates
  Transmission of an infection requires three conditions:*an infectious individual*a susceptible individual*an effective contact between themAn effective contact is defined as any kind of contact between two individuals such that, if one individual is infectious and the other susceptible, then the...
  
   vs. Force of infection
  Force of infection
  In epidemiology, force of infection is the rate at which susceptible individuals become infected by an infectious disease. Because it takes account of susceptibility it can be used to compare the rate of transmission between different groups of the population for the same infectious disease, or...
  
  
• Mortality rate
  Mortality rate
  Mortality rate is a measure of the number of deaths in a population, scaled to the size of that population, per unit time...
  
   vs. Standardized mortality ratio
  Standardized mortality ratio
  The standardized mortality ratio or SMR in epidemiology is the ratio of observed deaths to expected deaths, where expected deaths are calculated for a typical area with the same age and gender mix by looking at the death rates for different ages and genders in the larger population.The SMR may be...
  
   vs. Age-standardized mortality rate
• Pandemic
  Pandemic
  A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic...
  
   vs. Epidemic
  Epidemic
  In epidemiology, an epidemic , occurs when new cases of a certain disease, in a given human population, and during a given period, substantially exceed what is expected based on recent experience...
  
   vs. Endemic
  Endemic (epidemiology)
  In epidemiology, an infection is said to be endemic in a population when that infection is maintained in the population without the need for external inputs. For example, chickenpox is endemic in the UK, but malaria is not...
  
   vs. Syndemic
  Syndemic
  Syndemic refers to the aggregation of two or more diseases in a population in which there is some level of positive biological interaction that exacerbates the negative health effects of any or all of the diseases...
  
  
• Serial interval
  Serial interval
  In the epidemiology of communicable diseases, the serial interval refers to the time between successive cases in a chain of transmission....
  
   vs. Incubation period
  Incubation period
  Incubation period is the time elapsed between exposure to a pathogenic organism, a chemical or radiation, and when symptoms and signs are first apparent...
  
  
• Cancer cluster
  Cancer cluster
  Cancer cluster is a term used by epidemiologists, statisticians, and public health workers to define an occurrence of a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time....
  
  
• Sexual network
  Sexual network
  A sexual network is a social network that is defined by the sexual relationships within a set of individuals.-Studies and discoveries:Like other forms of social networks, sexual networks can be formally studied using the mathematics of graph theory and network theory.Recent epidemiological studies ...
  
  
• Years of potential life lost
  Years of potential life lost
  Years of potential life lost or potential years of life lost , is an estimate of the average years a person would have lived if he or she had not died prematurely. It is, therefore, a measure of premature mortality. As a method, it is an alternative to death rates that gives more weight to deaths...
  
  
• Maternal mortality rate
• Perinatal mortality rate
• Low Birth weight ratio

For assessing the effectiveness of an intervention:

• Absolute risk reduction
  Absolute risk reduction
  In epidemiology, the absolute risk reduction or risk difference is the decrease in risk of a given activity or treatment in relation to a control activity or treatment. It is the inverse of the number needed to treat....
  
  
• Control event rate
  Control event rate
  In epidemiology and biostatistics, the control event rate is a measure of how often a particular statistical event occurs within the scientific control group of an experiment ....
  
  
• Experimental event rate
  Experimental event rate
  In epidemiology and biostatistics, the experimental event rate is a measure of how often a particular statistical event occurs within the experimental group of an experiment ....
  
  
• Number needed to harm
  Number needed to harm
  The number needed to harm is an epidemiological measure that indicates how many patients need to be exposed to a risk-factor over a specific period to cause harm in one patient that would not otherwise have been harmed. It is defined as the inverse of the attributable risk...
  
  
• Number needed to treat
  Number needed to treat
  The number needed to treat is an epidemiological measure used in assessing the effectiveness of a health-care intervention, typically a treatment with medication. The NNT is the average number of patients who need to be treated to prevent one additional bad outcome...
  
  
• Odds ratio
  Odds ratio
  The odds ratio is a measure of effect size, describing the strength of association or non-independence between two binary data values. It is used as a descriptive statistic, and plays an important role in logistic regression...
  
  
• Relative risk reduction
  Relative risk reduction
  In epidemiology, the relative risk reduction is a measure calculated by dividing the absolute risk reduction by the control event rate.The relative risk reduction can be more useful than the absolute risk reduction in determining an appropriate treatment plan, because it accounts not only for the...
  
  
• Relative risk
  Relative risk
  In statistics and mathematical epidemiology, relative risk is the risk of an event relative to exposure. Relative risk is a ratio of the probability of the event occurring in the exposed group versus a non-exposed group....
  
  
• Relative survival
  Relative survival
  When describing the survival experience of a group of people or patients typically the method of overall survival is used, and it presents estimates of the proportion of people or patients alive at a certain point in time...
  
  

External links

• Health-EU Portal EU health statistics