Book Description

The second volume in the Wiley reference series in Biostatistics.
Featuring articles from the prestigious Encyclopedia of Biostatistics, many of which have been fully revised and updated to include recent developments, Biostatistics in Clinical Trials also includes up to 25ewly commissioned material reflecting the latest thinking in:

• Bayesian methods
• Benefit/risk assessment
• Cost-effectiveness
• Ethics
• Fraud

With exceptional contributions from leading experts in academia, government and industry, Biostatistics in Clinical Trials has been designed to complement existing texts by providing extensive, up-to-date coverage and introducing the reader to the research literature.
Offering comprehensive coverage of all aspects of clinical trials Biostatistics in Clinical Trials:

• Includes concise definitions and introductions to numerous concepts found in current literature
• Discusses the software and textbooks available
• Uses extensive cross-references helping to facilitate further research and enabling the reader to locate definitions and related concepts

Biostatistics in Clinical Trials offers both academics and practitioners from various disciplines and settings, such as universities, the pharmaceutical industry and clinical research organisations, up-to-date information as well as references to assist professionals involved in the design and conduct of clinical trials. ... Read more

Book Description

* A "first book" on how to access the vast and expanding array of medical information now available and how to critically evaluate it ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Helpful Gem
This is a gem of a book . It will be most helpful to those people who want to be an active participant in the healthcare decisions being made for them or for someone who they are close to and who needs an advocate. It does this by explaining, in layman's terms, how medical professionals arrive at conclusions about diagnoses and treatment. The book can be unsettling because it shows how much uncertainty is associated with medicine. But it will help anyone begin to understand the medical treatment they or a loved one might be undergoing. It does this not by being a medical textbook about diseases, though it contains many medical examples; instead it is a guide that helps the reader to ask questions and search for further information about what doctors say.

I was recently diagnosed with a medical problem. The book has helped me to think more actively about my treatment and to help me ask my doctor questions that I might not have thought about. Doctors are of ten not the all-knowing professionals you want them to be. In fact they should read this book as well.

The best way I can describe the contents of the book is to quote from the Preface, "This book sets the stage for understanding medical information in Chapters 1 and 2 .... Chapter 3 provides an overview of the types of medical research [and] the role of statistics in evaluating studies .... Chapters 4, 5, and 6 comprise a central core of knowledge about the high - as well as lower-tech processes by which we make diagnoses of individual patients, assess the health of populations, make decisions about treatments under conditions of uncertainty, and attempt to provide the best prognostic judgments possible given the great complexity and diversity among patients. The final sections of the book, Chapters 7 and 8, provide conceptual as well as practical guidelines for assessing the quality of medical information available on the Internet, explain the ways in which Internet resources might best be used to capture good information, and confront the current realities of what can and cannot be expected from "artificial intelligence."

Don't be put off by the statistical tables and terminology. They are explained remarkably well. You will learn how necessary statistics are to medicine without having to be a math whiz. I was amazed how the book made it easy to understand complex ideas in science, medicine and statistics. Reading this book is also a small intellectual adventure about how the science of medicine has evolved. The chapter on the Internet helps to grapple with the mass of information that can swamp you.

Each chapter is followed by a summary with suggested references. What I particularly liked was the short blurbs accompanying the references, making it easier to decide what might be worth further investigation. ... Read more

Book Description

The Biostatistics course is often found in the schools of public Health, medical schools, and, occasionally, in statistics and biology departments.
The population of students in these courses is a diverse one, with varying preparedness.The book assumes the reader has at least two years of high school algebra, but no previous exposure to statistics is required.
Written for individuals who might be fearful of mathematics, this book minimizes the technical difficulties and emphasizes the importance of statistics in scientific investigation.An understanding of underlying design and analysis is stressed. The limitations of the research, design and analytical techniques are discussed, allowing the reader to accurately interpret results. Real data, both processed and raw, are used extensively in examples and exercises.Statistical computing packages - MINITAB, SAS and Stata - are integrated.The use of the computer and software allows a sharper focus on the concepts, letting the computer do the necessary number-crunching.

* Emphasizes underlying statistical concepts more than competing texts
* Focuses on experimental design and analysis, at an elementary level
* Includes an introduction to linear correlation and regression
* Statistics are central: probability is downplayed
* Presents life tables and survival analysis
* Appendix with solutions to many exercises
* Special instructor's manual with solution to all exercises ... Read more

Book Description

Showcasing a broad discussion of the experimental process and a review of basic statistics, this volume provides tried and proven methodologies that will enable statisticians to quickly identify general data distribution, skewness, and outliers. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

very good book
A very good book for critical appraisal. Easy to read with loads of funny examples. A few typo's with one or two graphics but on the whole, well worth it. ... Read more

Book Description

Building upon material presented in the first edition, Statistical Methods for Health Sciences, Second Edition continues to address the analytical issues related to the modeling and analysis of cluster data, both physical clustering-sampling of communities, families, or herds-and overtime clustering-longitudinal, repeated measures, or time series data.All examples in this new edition are solved using the SAS package, and all SAS programs are provided for understanding material presented.Numerous medical examples make this text especially suitable for applied health scientists and epidemiologists. ... Read more

Book Description

Modern Analysis provides coverage of real and abstract analysis, offering a sensible introduction to functional analysis as well as a thorough discussion of measure theory, Lebesgue integration, and related topics. This significant study clearly and distinctively presents the teaching and research literature of graduate analysis:oProviding a fundamental, modern approach to measure theoryoInvestigating advanced material on the Bochner integral, geometric theory, and major theorems in Fourier Analysis Rn, including the theory of singular integrals and Milhin's theorem - material that does not appear in textbooksoOffering exceptionally concise and cardinal versions of all the main theorems about characteristic functionsoContaining an original examination of sufficient statistics, based on the general theory of Radon measuresWith an ambitious scope, this resource unifies various topics into one volume succinctly and completely. The contents span basic measure theory in an abstract and concrete form, material on classic linear functional analysis, probability, and some major results used in the theory of partial differential equations. Two different proofs of the central limit theorem are examined as well as a straightforward approach to conditional probability and expectation.Modern Analysis provides ample and well-constructed exercises and examples. Introductory topology is included to help the reader understand such items as the Riesz theorem, detailing its proofs and statements. This work will help readers apply measure theory to probability theory, guiding them to understand the theorems rather than merely follow directions. ... Read more

Book Description

The monograph demonstrates the widespread existence of differences in life span by month of birth in the elderly populations of contemporary societies. It provides evidence that the pattern is linked to the seasons of the year, by comparing the Northern and the Southern Hemisphere. It formulates and tests a series of explanations for the month-of-birth effect and rejects many of the most frequently offered explanations. In particular, it rejects those that attribute the month-of-birth effect to social or statistical confounding. It establishes a link between the month-of-birth pattern in the life span and the month-of-birth pattern in survival during the first year of life. It provides evidence that nutrition and infectious disease early in life play an important role in adult health and survival later in life and that the differences in life span by month of birth still exist in cohorts born today.

Book Description

This book presents a systematic treatment of Markov chains, diffusion processes and state space models, as well as alternative approaches to Markov chains through stochastic difference equations and stochastic differential equations. It illustrates how these processes and approaches are applied to many problems in genetics, carcinogenesis, AIDS epidemiology and other biomedical systems.

One feature of the book is that it describes the basic MCMC (Markov chain and Monte Carlo) procedures and illustrates how to use the Gibbs sampling method and the multilevel Gibbs sampling method to solve many problems in genetics, carcinogenesis, AIDS and other biomedical systems.

As another feature, the book develops many state space models for many genetic problems, carcinogenesis, AIDS epidemiology and HIV pathogenesis. It shows in detail how to use the multilevel Gibbs sampling method to estimate (or predict) simultaneously the state variables and the unknown parameters in cancer chemotherapy, carcinogenesis, AIDS epidemiology and HIV pathogenesis. As a matter of fact, this book is the first to develop many state space models for many genetic problems, carcinogenesis and other biomedical problems. ... Read more

Book Description

Epidemiology of Rheumatic Diseases 2e summarizes all the all the available data on the occurence and risk factors for the major epidemiological, musculosketal, connective tissue and bone disorders.The aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of published data world-wide and include such aspects as temporal and geographical trends in disease, contribution of genetic, constitutional and environmental factors to disease occurence as well as the influence of traditional epidemiological risk factors such as age and gender.The available data is critically appraised to provide the reader with some information as to the relative robustness of the published material. Since the first edition was published in 1993 there have been major advances in all the subject areas covered in the book.As a consequence much of the original material is now out of date and the book has been extensively re-written.Additional chapters have been added on systematic vasculities and Paget's disease and much more attention has been given to neck and upper limb pain disorders as well as chronic widespread pain and fibromyalgia.In addition a new chapter has been provided reviewing population studies as a whole of musculosketal morbidity.The authors have also taken the opportunity to comletely rewrite the section on genetics taking advantage of the tremendous advances in this area. ... Read more

Book Description

Computer scientists have increasingly been enlisted as "bioinformaticians" to assist molecular biologists in their research. This book is a practical introduction to bioinformatics for these computer scientists. The chapters are in-depth discussions by expert bioinformaticians on both general techniques and specific approaches to a range of selected bioinformatics problems. The book is organized into clusters of chapters on the following topics:

Ÿ Overview of modern molecular biology and a broad spectrum of techniques from computer science — data mining, machine learning, mathematical modeling, sequence alignment, data integration, workflow development, etc.
Ÿ In-depth discussion of computational recognition of functional and regulatory sites in DNA sequences.
Ÿ Incisive discussion of computational prediction of secondary structure of RNA sequences.
Ÿ Overview of computational prediction of protein cellular localization, and selected discussions of inference of protein function.
Ÿ Overview of methods for discovering protein–protein interactions.
Ÿ Detailed discussion of approaches to gene expression analysis for the diagnosis of diseases, the treatment of diseases, and the understanding of gene functions.
Ÿ Case studies on analysis of phylogenies, functional annotation of proteins, construction of purpose-built integrated biological databases, and development of workflows underlying the large-scale-effort gene discovery. ... Read more

Book Description

This book is an expanded version of the Kahn's widely used text, An Introduction to Epidemiologic Methods (Oxford, 1983).It provides clear insight into the basic statistical tools used in epidemiology and is written so that those without advanced statistical training can comprehend the ideas underlying the analytical techniques.The authors emphasize the extent to which similar results are obtained from different methods, both simple and complex. To this edition they have added a new chapter on "Comparison of Numerical Results for Various Methods of Adjustment" and also one on "The Primacy of Data Collection."New topics include the Kaplan-Meier product-limit method and the Cox proportional hazards model for analysis of time-related outcomes.An appendix of data from the Framingham Heart Study is used to illustrate the application of various analytical methods to an identical set of real data and provides source material for student exercises. The text has been updated throughout. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Kahn and Sempos
What we like. Comprehensive, concise, and clear. Fills the VOID left by other epidemiology analysis texts and the statistics not calculated by SPSS and SAS. Our constant companion in each epidemiology research task. What we do not like. More information on regression analysis in the next edition please. ... Read more

Book Description

Computers offer increasing benefits in the practice of medicine, in management and in clinical research. Computing for Clinicians provides a basic understanding of computers, their use, and their place in clinical medicine for all physicians working with computers, allowing them to use available resources to their full potential. The book starts with a simplified account of the current technology of computers and an explanation of the more commonly used jargon. Subsequent chapters address the main applications: administration; data analysis and medical equipment; clinical data collection; clinical diagnosis; treatment; and education. ... Read more

Book Description

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease," first diagnosed in late 1986, is transmitted through feed, indirect horizontal transmission, apparently maternally and possibly horizontally, through cattle-to-cattle contact or a contaminated environment. With no ante-mortem test yet developed, the only information available about BSE is from case surveillance and a limited number of experiments. Only through careful and rigorous modeling and analysis can reliable estimates of past infection and predictions of future cases be made. The modeling developed for BSE utilizes a range of techniques from statistics, ecology, and demography that is of interest both as a case study and for providing tools for other modeling projects. Statistical Aspects of BSE and vCJD: Models for Epidemics presents the general methodology required for thorough analysis and modeling of novel long incubation diseases with largely unknown etiology. BSE in British cattle is the primary example system presented, but application to other diseases, particularly the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (e.g., Scrapie in sheep and nvCJD in humans) are also highlighted. The book concentrates on presenting an exposition of the "state-of-the-art" rather than introductory material on the mathematical/statistical modeling of infectious diseases. ... Read more

Book Description

Practical Handbook of Sample Size Guidelines for Clinical Trials is a concise guide and powerful software utility program that provides a valuable, non-technical blueprint for the design and analysis of survival clinical trials. This text and software allow clinical researchers to write more effective protocols or research grant proposals in a fraction of the time it would take them otherwise. Clinical researchers also gain insight into how biostatisticians analyze trial data and discover what "p-values" really tell them. If you are a biostatistician or student, this book and software will be an indispensable tool for study design. Furthermore, no other book provides justification for survival analysis results at such an introductory level. The program increases your flexibility because it allows you to browse through various planning parameter configurations by changing one parameter at a time, circumventing the need to re-enter the set of planning parameters.Practical Handbook of Sample Size Guidelines for Clinical Trials is ideal for biostatisticians, clinical oncologists, epidemiologists, public health specialists, hematologists, and other researchers who need a concise, easy-to-use tool for sample size determination. ... Read more