Medical Statistics & Demography Made Easy

Book Preface

There are many books on general applied statistics, assuming various level of mathematical knowledge, but no book is available which is specially designed for Medical Students at undergraduate level. The main feature of this book is that it will help medical students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as those students who are preparing for various PGME examinations.

The present book, which is explicitly directed towards medical applications, will have two special aspects. First, use of examples almost entirely related to medical problems, which I think, help the research workers and students to understand the underlying computational points. Second, the choice of statistical topics reflects the extent of their usage in medical research. Several topics, such as vital statistics, statistical methods in epidemiology and health information would not normally be included in the general book on applied statistics.

This book is intended to be useful to both medical research workers with very little mathematical expertise as well as those students who are preparing for various PGME examinations. The emphasis throughout is on the general concept underlying statistical techniques. Proofs are regarded as of secondary importance, and are usually omitted. Though, there are many mathematical formulae, but these are necessary for computations and the relationship between various methods. They rarely involve other than very simple algebraic manipulations. Some computational steps, such as those involve in probability and significance test are perhaps more difficult. I have given some solved examples clearly mentioning every steps involve in the computation.

Nearly 50 unsolved questions mainly related to medical problems are included, which will help undergraduate students in their professional examination. For students preparing for PGME examination, nearly 300 MCQs related to various topics are included in this book. These includes questions asked in various competitive examinations as well as questions which I thought are important for such tests. Going through these questions will help them to solve problems related to Statistics and Demography in their competitive examinations.

I owe thanks to my colleagues especially in Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology and of Community Medicine. Special thanks to my wife Mrs. Anita Sharma, and my son Dr. Pulak Sharma who helped me a lot by suggesting me to frame this work according to problems which he and his friends are facing.

I express my deep sense of gratitude to my publisher Jaypee Brothers Medical Publishers (P) Ltd for their untiring efforts in bringing out this book in such an elegant form.

Suggestions and criticism for further improvement of this book as well as errors and misprint will be most gratefully received and duly acknowledged.

Devashish Sharma

Contents
1. Classification and Tabulation ……………………………….. 1
2. Measure of Central Tendency ……………………………… 15
3. Measure of Dispersion ………………………………………… 31
4. Theoretical Discrete and Continuous Distribution …….. 47
5. Correlation and Regression …………………………………. 61
6. Probability …………………………………………………………… 73
7. Sampling and Design of Experiments ………………… 83
8. Testing of Hypothesis …………………………………………. 99
9. Non-parametric Tests ………………………………………… 151
10. Statistical Methods in Epidemiology ………………… 163
11. Vital Statistics (Demography) ……………………………. 209
12. Health Information ……………………………………………. 239
13. A Report on Census 2001 …………………………………… 247
14. National Population Policy ……………………………….. 287
Unsolved Questions …………………………………………………. 305
Answers of MCQs and Unsolved Questions …………… 327
Appendix : Statistical Tables …………………………………………. 335
Index ………………………………………………………………………….. 349