Introduction To

Biostatistics

1
Pharmacy Practice- 1B
 Introduction
Some Basic concepts
Statistics is a field of study concerned
with
1- collection, organization, summarization
and analysis of data.
2- drawing of inferences about a body of
data when only a part of the data is
observed.
Statisticians try to interpret and
communicate the results to others.
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 * Biostatistics:
The tools of statistics are employed in many
fields:
business, education, psychology,
agriculture, medical, economics, … etc.
When the data analyzed are derived from
the biological science and medicine,
we use the term biostatistics to distinguish
this particular application of statistical
tools and concepts.

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 Application of biostatistics in Pharmacy

• Pharmaceutical statistics is the application of statistics to

matters concerning the pharmaceutical industry. This can be
from issues of design of experiments, to analysis of drug trials,
to issues of commercialization of a medicine.
❖Evaluate the activity of a drug; e.g.; effect of caffeine on
attention; compare the analgesic effect of a plant extract and
NSAID
❖To explore whether the changes produced by the drug are due
to the action of drug or by chance
❖To compare the action of two or more different drugs or
different dosages of the same drug are studied using statistical
methods.
❖To find an association between disease and risk factors such
as Coronary artery disease and smoking

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 • Public health, including epidemiology, health
services research, nutrition, environmental health
and healthcare policy & management.
• Design and analysis of clinical trials in medicine
• Demographic studies: Age, gender, height,
weight, BMI
• Epidemiology: deficiency of iron in anemia,
iodized salt and goiter, hygiene and microbial
disease

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 Data:

• The raw material of Statistics is data.

• We may define data as figures. Figures
result from the process of counting or
from taking a measurement.
• For example:
• - When a hospital administrator counts the
number of patients (counting).
• - When a nurse weighs a patient
(measurement)

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 Sources of data

Records Surveys Experiments

Comprehensive Sample

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 * Sources of Data:
We search for suitable data to serve as the
raw material for our investigation.
Such data are available from one or more of
the following sources:
1- Routinely kept records.
For example:
- Hospital medical records contain immense
amounts of information on patients.
- Hospital accounting records contain a
wealth of data on the facility’s business
- activities.

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2- External sources.
The data needed to answer a question may already
exist in the form of
published reports, commercially available data
banks, or the research literature, i.e. someone else
has already asked the same question.

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3- Surveys:
The source may be a survey, if the data needed is
about answering certain questions.
For example:
If the administrator of a clinic wishes to obtain
information regarding the mode of transportation
used by patients to visit the clinic,
then a survey may be conducted among
patients to obtain this information.

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4- Experiments.
Frequently the data needed to answer
a question are available only as the
result of an experiment.
For example:
If a pharmacist wishes to know which of several
strategies is best for maximizing patient
compliance,
he might conduct an experiment in which the
different strategies of motivating compliance
are tried with different patients.
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 * A variable:
It is a characteristic that takes on different
values in different persons, places, or
things.
For example:
- heart rate,
- the heights of adult males,
- the weights of preschool children,
- the ages of patients seen in a dental clinic.

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 Types of variables

Quantitative Qualitative
variables variables
Quantitative Qualitative
continuous nominal

Quantitative Qualitative
descrete ordinal

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 Types of variables

Quantitative
Qualitative

Quantitative Variables Qualitative Variables

It can be measured in Many characteristics are not
the usual sense. capable of being
For example: measured. Some of them
- the heights of adult can be ordered or ranked.
males, For example:
- the weights of
- classification of people into
preschool children, socio-economic groups,
- the ages of patients
- social classes based on
seen in a income, education, etc.
- dental clinic.

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 Types of
quantitative
variables
Discrete Continuous

A discrete variable A continuous variable

is characterized by gaps can assume any value within a
or interruptions in the specified relevant interval of
values that it can values assumed by the variable.
assume.
For example: For example:
- Height,
- The number of daily
admissions to a - weight,
general hospital, - skull circumference.
- The number of No matter how close together the
decayed, missing or observed heights of two people,
filled teeth per child we can find another person
- in an whose height falls somewhere in
between.
- elementary
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 Univariate and Bivariate Data

• Univariate: one variable

• Bivariate: two variables

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 Univariate Data

• Univariate means "one variable" (one type of data)

• Example: Travel Time (minutes): 15, 29, 8, 42, 35, 21, 18,
42, 26
• The variable is Travel Time

• We can do lots of things with univariate data:

• Find a central value using mean, median and mode
• Find how spread out it is using range, quartiles and
standard deviation
• Make plots like Bar Graphs, Pie Charts and
Histograms

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 Bivariate Data

• Bivariate means "two variables", in other words

there are two types of data.
• With bivariate data we have two sets of related
data we want to compare:
• Example: Sales vs Temperature
• An ice cream shop keeps track of how much ice
cream they sell versus the temperature on that
day.
• The two variables are Ice Cream Sales and
Temperature.

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 • And here is the same data as a Scatter Plot:

• Now we can easily see that warmer weather

and more ice cream sales are linked, but the
relationship is not perfect.
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 • We can use Tables, Scatter Plots, Correlation,
Line of Best Fit, and plain old common sense.

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 Multivariate Data

• Multivariate data is the data in which analysis are

based on more than two variables per
observation. Usually multivariate data is used for
explanatory purposes.

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 * A population:

It is the largest collection of values of a

random variable for which we have an
interest at a particular time.
For example:
The weights of all the children enrolled in a
certain elementary school.
Populations may be finite or infinite.

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 * A sample:
It is a part of a population.
For example:
The weights of only a fraction of
these children.

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