Statistics in Health, Medicine Examined

摘要

The interaction between statistics and health and medicine is well-represented in the winter issue of CHANCE. Articles and columns concern measuring health disparities, studying sleep and sleep disorders, defining and measuring disability, using machine learning in medical diagnosis, comparing effectiveness of antibiotics, and the emerging fields of pharmaco-genetics and pharmacogenomics. Ken Keppel and Jeff Pearcy describe Healthy People 2010, a national initiative to coordinate health improvement and prevent disease. Of course, you have to measure disease rates if you want to judge performance. How many data sources do you think are involved? Numerical examples contrast absolute and relative measures of disability.