Medical Statistics vs Biostatistics

Medical statistics vs biostatistics: New medical statisticians and biostatisticians must be able to look at data and make decisions based on what it is telling them. This requires learning medical statistical methods, which are applicable in hospitals, research labs, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies. The data from peer-reviewed studies is used to make critical decisions like which medicine will work best for a specific disease or patient.

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medical statistics vs biostatistics

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. However, “biostatistics” more commonly connotes all applications of statistics to biology. 

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.

Medical Statistics

Medical statistics is the application of statistical knowledge and methods to the field of medicine and medical practice.

Although medical statistics has been a recognised branch of statistics in the UK for more than 40 years, the term does not appear to have come into general use in North America, where the wider term ‘biostatistics’ is used and encompasses the application of statistics (the branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection and interpretation of quantitative data and the use of probability theory to estimate population parameters) to medical-related data as well as those in the wider field of biology.

My preferred definition of medical statistics is the one I have coined above. The current (June 2009) definition of medical statistics in Wikipedia is, like many things in Wikipedia, an unsatisfactory work in progress. It says that medical statistics is “the field of medicine dealing with applications of statistics to the field of health and medicine.”

An entry in Answers.com throws some interesting light on the history of what we would now call medical statistics, quoting sources that trace its roots to the eighteenth century:

“One tradition [which flowed from Graunt’s and Petty’s early work] was medical statistics, which developed most fully in England during the eighteenth century. Physicians such as James Jurin (1684–1750) and William Black (1749–1829) advocated the collection and evaluation of numerical information about the incidence and mortality of diseases. Jurin pioneered the use of statistics in the 1720s to evaluate medical practice in his studies of the risks associated with smallpox inoculation. William Black coined the term medical arithmetic to refer to the tradition of using numbers to analyze the comparative mortality of different diseases. New hospitals and dispensaries such as the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital, established in the eighteenth century, provided institutional support for the collection of medical statistics; some treatments were evaluated numerically.”

Biostatistics

A search for the term ‘biostatistics’ or ‘biometrics’ returns many definitions, of which the following are a selection:

“The theory and techniques for describing, analyzing, and interpreting health data.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“The use of statistical tests to analyze biological data” Duke Clinical Research Institute.

“The science of statistics applied to the analysis of biological or medical data.” The American Heritage Medical Dictionary (2004) Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

“Numeric data on births, deaths, diseases, injuries, and other factors affecting the general health and condition of human populations. Also called vital statistics” Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 8th edition. 2009, Elsevier

“Biostatistics (a combination of the words biology and statistics; sometimes referred to as biometry or biometrics) is the application of statistics to a wide range of topics in biology. The science of biostatistics encompasses the design of biological experiments, especially in medicine and agriculture; the collection, summarization, and analysis of data from those experiments; and the interpretation of, and inference from, the results.”
“A branch of biology that studies biological phenomena and observations by means of statistical analysis.” WordNet.
“The science of collecting and analyzing biologic or health data using statistical methods. Biostatistics may be used to help learn the possible causes of a cancer or how often a cancer occurs in a certain group of people. 

types of 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 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. 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
Clinical biostatistics
Clinical biostatistics is concerned with research into the principles and methodology used in the design and analysis of clinical research and to apply statistical theory to clinical medicine.[3]

There is a society for Clinical Biostatistics with annual conferences since its founding in 1978.[3]

Clinical Biostatistics is taught in postgraduate 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) 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, respectively, where the null hypothesis 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 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

importance of medical statistics

Medical statistics is the study of human health and disease. Its applications ranging from biomedical laboratory research, to clinical medicine, to health promotion, to national and global systems of health care to medicine and the health sciences, including public health, forensic medicine, epidemiology and clinical research. It is a branch of statistics commonly named as biostatistics. It is the science of summarizing, collecting, presenting and interpreting data in medical approach and using this data estimate the magnitude of associations and test hypotheses. It has a main role in medical investigations. Biostatistics has played an integral role in modern medicine .Statisticians help researchers design studies, analyze data from medical experiments, decide what data to collect, help interpret the results of the analyses, and collaborate in writing articles to describe the results of medical research. Biostatistics helps researchers make sense of the datas collected to decide whether a treatment is working or to find factors that contribute to diseases. Medical statisticians design and analyse studies to identify the real causes of health issues as distinct from chance variation.

Why Are Statistics Important in the Health Care Field?

Now a days health care organizations employ statistical analysis to measure their performance outcomes. Hospitals and other large provider service organizations continuous quality improvement programs, implement data driven, to maximize efficiency.Government health and human service agencies measure the overall health and well being of populations with statistical information.

Health Care Uitilization

Researchers use scientific methods to gather data on samples of human population. The health care organizations benefits from knowing consumer market characteristics such as age, sex, race, income and disabilities. These type of statistics can predict what type of services that people are using and the level of care that is affordable to them.

Resource Allocation

Statistical information is necessary in determining which resources are used to produce goods and service ,what combination of goods and services to produce, and to which populations to serve them. Health care statistics are critical to production efficiency and allocation. Valid statistical information minimizes the risks of health care trade offs.

Needs Assessment

Public and private health care administrators, charged with providing continues care to diverse populations, compare existing services to community needs. Statistical analysis is a major component in a needs assessment. Statistics are equally important to pharmaceutical and technology companies in developing product lines that meet the needs of the populations they serve.

Quality Improvement

Health care suppliers struggle to make effective goods and services efficiently. Statistics are important to health care organisations in measuring performance success or failure. By building benchmarks, or standards of service excellence, quality improvement managers can measure future results. Analysts chart the overall growth and ability to survive of a health care company using statistical data gathered over time.

Product Development

Innovative medicine begins and ends with statistical analysis. Data are collected and reported in clinical trials of new technologies and treatments to weigh products benefits against their risks. Statistics indirectly influence pricing of product by describing consumer demand in measurable units.