Statistics and Clinical Data Analysis: A Reference Guide

Abstract

Statistics, which is widely used in medicine, is a branch of mathematics that focuses on collection, presentation, analysis, and interpretation of numerical and categorical data. Examples include the analysis of data from clinical trials of drugs and other interventions, modeling the progression of a disease over time, examining the diagnostic performance of medical tests, studying relationships between biomarkers and cognitive performance, and retrospective evaluation of cancer diagnosis via magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. This chapter presents an abbreviated reference guide to statistical methods in clinical research. One of the goals of this chapter is to emphasize applications to current problems and data from pulmonary vascular disease. We attempt to cover the basics of statistical thinking and the issues that arise frequently in clinical research, and provide references to the literature offering more extensive coverage of the topics considered here and pointers to work on more technical or specialized topics. The major goal is to present and discuss the statistical methods commonly used and relevant to research in pulmonary vascular disease.