The Essentials of Biostatistics for Physicians, Nurses, and Clinicians

by Chernick, Michael R.

• ISBN13: 9780470641859
• ISBN10: 0470641851
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-09-27
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

Many universities, hospitals, and medical research facilities offer short courses in introductory biostatistics for the clinicians, fellows, nurses, and health practitioners to become familiarized with statistical methods. Written in a concise, clear, and straight-to-the-point style, this book begins with a basic introduction to the relationship between biostatistics and medical research. Subsequent chapters explore numerical techniques, including sampling from populations, graphics and summary statistics, normal distribution and related properties, estimating means and proportions, hypothesis testing, correlation, regression, diagnostics, logistic regression, contingency tables, nonparametric methods, and survival analysis.

Author Biography

Michael R. Chernick is Manager of Biostatistical Services at Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, where he conducts statistical design and analysis for pharmaceutical research. He has more than thirty years of experience in the application of statistical methods to such areas a medicine, energy, engineering, insurance, and pharmaceuticals. Dr. Chernick is the author of Bootstrap Methods: A Guide for Practitioners and Researchers, Second Edition, and the coauthor of Introductory Biostatistics fir the Health Sciences: Modern Applications Including Bootstrap, both published by Wiley.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
The What, Why, and How of Biostatistics in Medical Research	p. 1
Definition of Statistics and Biostatistics	p. 1
Why Study Statistics?	p. 3
The Medical Literature	p. 9
Medical Research Studies	p. 11
Cross-sectional studies including surveys	p. 11
Retrospective studies	p. 12
Prospective studies other than clinical trials	p. 12
Controlled clinical trials	p. 12
Conclusions	p. 13
Exercises	p. 14
Sampling from Populations	p. 15
Definitions of Populations and Samples	p. 17
Simple Random Sampling	p. 18
Selecting Simple Random Samples	p. 19
Other Sampling Methods	p. 27
Generating Bootstrap Samples	p. 28
Exercises	p. 32
Graphics and Summary Statistics	p. 34
Continuous and Discrete Data	p. 34
Categorical Data	p. 35
Frequency Histograms	p. 35
Stem-and-Leaf Diagrams	p. 38
Box Plots	p. 39
Bar and Pie Charts	p. 39
Measures of the Center of a Distribution	p. 42
Measures of Dispersion	p. 46
Exercises	p. 50
Normal Distribution and Related Properties	p. 51
Averages and the Central Limit Theorem	p. 51
Standard Error of the Mean	p. 53
Student's t-Distribution	p. 53
Exercises	p. 55
Estimating Means and Proportions	p. 58
The Binomial and Poisson Distributions	p. 58
Point Estimates	p. 59
Confidence Intervals	p. 62
Sample Size Determination	p. 65
Bootstrap Principle and Bootstrap Confidence Intervals	p. 66
Exercises	p. 69
Hypothesis Testing	p. 72
Type I and Type II Errors	p. 73
One-Tailed and Two-Tailed Tests	p. 74
P-Values	p. 74
Comparing Means from Two Independent Samples: Two Sample t-Test	p. 75
Paired t-Test	p. 76
Testing a Single Binomial Proportion	p. 78
Relationship Between Confidence Intervals and Hypothesis Test	p. 79
Sample Size Determination	p. 80
Bootstrap Tests	p. 81
Medical Diagnosis: Sensitivity and Specificity	p. 82
Special Tests in Clinical Research	p. 83
Superiority tests	p. 84
Equivalence and bioequivalence	p. 84
Noninferiority tests	p. 86
Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance and Longitudinal Data Analysis	p. 86
Meta-Analysis	p. 88
Exercises	p. 92
Correlation, Regression, and Logistic Regression	p. 95
Relationship Between Two Variables and the Scatter Plot	p. 96
Pearson's Correlation	p. 99
Simple Linear Regression and Least Squares Estimation	p. 101
Sensitivity to Outliers and Robust Regression	p. 104
Multiple Regression	p. 111
Logistic Regression	p. 117
Exercises	p. 122
Contingency Tables	p. 127
2 x 2 Tables and Chi-Square	p. 127
Simpson's Paradox in the 2 x 2 Table	p. 129
The General R x C Table	p. 132
Fisher's Exact Test	p. 133
Correlated Proportions and McNemar's Test	p. 136
Relative Risk and Odds Ratio	p. 138
Exercises	p. 141
Nonparametric Methods	p. 145
Ranking Data	p. 146
Wilcoxon Rank-Sum Test	p. 146
Sign Test	p. 149
Spearman's Rank-Order Correlation Coefficient	p. 150
Insensitivity of Rank Tests to Outliers	p. 153
Exercises	p. 154
Survival Analysis	p. 158
Time-to-Event Data and Right Censoring	p. 159
Life Tables	p. 160
Kaplan-Meier Curves	p. 164
The Kaplan-Meier curve: a nonparametric estimate of survival	p. 164
Confidence intervals for the Kaplan-Meier estimate	p. 165
The logrank and chi-square tests: comparing two or more survival curves	p. 166
Parametric Survival Curves	p. 168
Negative exponential survival distributions	p. 168
Weibull family of survival distributions	p. 169
Cox Proportional Hazard Models	p. 170
Cure Rate Models	p. 171
Exercises	p. 173
Solutions to Selected Exercises	p. 175
Appendix: Statistical Tables	p. 192
References	p. 204
Author Index	p. 209
Subject Index	p. 211
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