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