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 does not have 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 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 provide 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

Basic concepts

 * For describing situations
 * Incidence (epidemiology) vs. Prevalence vs. Cumulative incidence
 * 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

Related statistical theory

 * 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.