Fourth Edition
This edition first published 2020
© 2020 John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Edition History
John Wiley and Sons (3e, 2014)
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Bowers, David, 1938– author.
Title: Medical statistics from scratch : an introduction for health professionals / David Bowers.
Description: 4th edition. | Hoboken NJ : Wiley, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019015126 (print) | LCCN 2019015564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119523925 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119523949 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119523888 (pbk.)
Subjects: | MESH: Biometry | Statistics as Topic
Classification: LCC RA409 (ebook) | LCC RA409 (print) | NLM WA 950 | DDC 610.72/7–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019015126
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: Courtesy of David Bowers
I noticed when looking at the prefaces to each of the first three editions, that there seems to be a gap of five years between each one. And this fourth edition is no exception – it’s five years since I wrote the preface to the third edition, in 2013. Spooky or what! But anyway, this new edition has given me an opportunity to completely refresh the book. I have added three shiny new chapters covering important areas in medical statistics:
I have also made numerous additions in most of the other chapters. These include, for example:
Apart from the above additions, I have added many new examples and exercises, and have rewritten much of the existing text to (hopefully) make it easier and more accessible.
Finally, I want to thank all of those who helped me in the writing of this book, and Barbara Noble in particular for bravely (and very competently) copy‐editing and proofreading the material. Any remaining errors are of course mine.
As always I am happy to receive comments and criticism of my book, and I welcome any suggestions for improvement.
“Reader, I married him.” Whoops! Wrong book.
The 1st edition of this book was published in 2002 and the 2nd edition in 2008. I was surprised when I discovered it was quite such a long time ago. Where did the time go! Anyway, over the course of the last five years, I have received many favourable comments from readers of my book, which of course is immensely gratifying. I must be doing something right then.
This edition contains a completely new chapter (on diagnostic tests), there is a quite a lot of new material and most of the chapters have received an extensive re‐write. I have also updated virtually all of the examples drawn from the journals and added many new exercises. I hope that this gives the book a fresh feel – as well as a new lease of life.
The book should appeal, as before, to everybody in health care (students and professionals alike) including nurses, doctors, health visitors, physiotherapists, midwives, radiographers, dieticians, speech therapists, health educators and promoters, chiropodists and all those other allied and auxiliary professionals. It might possibly also be of interest to veterinary surgeons, one of whom reviewed my proposal fairly enthusiastically.
My thanks to Jon Peacock and all the others at Wiley who have shepherded me along in the past and no doubt will do so in the future. I must also thank Barbara Noble, who patiently acted as my first‐line copyeditor. She read through my manuscript, discovered quite a few errors of various sorts and made many valuable suggestions to improve readability. Any remaining mistakes are of course mine.
I also want to acknowledge my great debt to Susanne, who always encourages me, enthusiastically, in everything I attempt.
Finally, I would like to mention another book which might be of interest to any readers who are thinking of embarking on research for the first time – Getting Started in Health Research, Bowers et al., Wiley, 2012. This book covers both quantitative and qualitative research. It will guide you through the research process, from the very first idea to the interpretation of your results and your conclusions.
This book is a “not‐too‐mathematical” introduction to medical statistics. It should appeal to anyone training or working in the health care arena – whatever his or her particular discipline is – who wants either a simple introduction to the subject or a gentle reminder of stuff that they might have forgotten. I have aimed the book at:
The most significant change in this edition is the addition of two new chapters, one on measuring survival and the other on systematic review and meta‐analysis. The ability to understand the principles of survival analysis is important, not least because of its popularity in clinical research and consequently in the clinical literature. Similarly, the increasing importance of evidence‐based clinical practice means that systematic review and meta‐analysis also demand a place. In addition, I have taken the opportunity to correct and freshen the text in a few places, as well as adding a small number of new examples. My thanks to Lucy Sayer, my editor at John Wiley & Sons, for her enthusiastic support, to Liz Renwick and Robert Hambrook and all the other people in Wiley for their invaluable help and my special thanks to my copyeditor Barbara Noble for her truly excellent work and enthusiasm (of course, any remaining errors are mine).
I am happy to get any comments from you. You can e‐mail me at: d.bowers@leeds.ac.uk.
This book is intended to be an introduction to medical statistics but one which is not too mathematical – in fact, it has the absolute minimum of maths. The exceptions however are Chapters 17 and 18, which have maths on linear and logistic regressions. It is really impossible to provide material on these procedures without some maths, and I hesitated about including them at all. However, they are such useful and widely used techniques, particularly logistic regression and its production of odds ratios, which I felt they must go in. Of course, you do not have to read them. It should appeal to anyone training or working in the health care arena – whatever his or her particular discipline is – who wants a simple, not‐too‐technical introduction to the subject. I have aimed the book at:
I intended originally to make this book as an amalgam of two previous books of mine, Statistics from Scratch for Health Care Professionals and Statistics Further from Scratch. However, although it covers a lot of the same material as in those two books, this is in reality a completely new book, with a lot of extra stuff, particularly on linear and logistic regressions. I am happy to get any comments and criticisms from you. You can e‐mail me at: slothist@hotmail.com.