Question

Medical statistics studies the questions connected with medicine, hygiene and public health services. Specify one of the sections of medical statistics.

Answer 1

Medical Statistics studies the applications and questions pertaining to medical world including medicine, hygiene and public health services.

One of the sections is public health and one of the significant branches of study pertaining to it is epidemiology. It refers to the analysis of possible determinants of heath and diseases in defined populations. This study gives us idea about risk factors for the public healthcare system.

There are different types of studies to identify such risk factors. A couple of the most used types are case control studies and cohort studies. Case control ones refer to a group of disease positive and another group of disease negative and look back in time to the potential exposures they might have had. This is restrospective study and takes little time. Cohort studies are based selecting cohorts based on different exposures and both the groups are disease free at the start of the study. Over time they are tracked to see it they have developed the disease. This is not a retrospective study but a forward looking one and this can take a lot of time as some diseases have long incubation periods.

There are other studies and designs and techniques in this branch, with many applications and consequences of the same.But invariably, statistics and their experimental designs play a pivotal role in medical statistics.