Okeh U M
Department of Industrial Mathematics and Applied Statistics, Ebonyi State University, Nigeria.
East Afr J Public Health. 2009 Apr;6 Suppl(1):1-7. doi: 10.4314/eajph.v6i3.45762.
Many medical specialties have reviewed the drawbacks of statistical methods in medical diagnosis in specialized areas in their journals. To my knowledge this has not been done in general practice. Given the main role of a general practitioner as a biostatistician, I thought it would be of interest to enumerate statistical problems in assessing methods of medical diagnosis in general terms. In conducting and reporting of medical research, there are some common problems in using statistical methodology which may result in invalid inferences being made. This paper is aimed to highlight to inexperienced statisticians, medical practitioners and personnel as well as other non-statisticians some of the common statistical problems encountered when using statistics to interpret data in medical research. I also comment on good practices to avoid some of these problems.
许多医学专科领域都在其期刊中审视了医学诊断中统计方法在特定领域的弊端。据我所知，全科医疗领域尚未有过此类审视。鉴于全科医生作为生物统计学家的主要角色，我认为从总体上列举医学诊断评估方法中的统计问题会很有意思。在医学研究的开展和报告过程中，使用统计方法存在一些常见问题，这些问题可能导致得出无效的推断。本文旨在向经验不足的统计人员、医学从业者及相关人员以及其他非统计专业人士强调在医学研究中运用统计方法解读数据时遇到的一些常见统计问题。我还会对避免其中一些问题的良好做法加以评论。
