Amputation Statistics—How to Interpret Them?

Serum tumour markers: how to order and interpret them.

New estimates of maternal mortality and how to interpret them: choice or confusion?

Two independent exercises to estimate levels of maternal mortality took place during 2010, one published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, USA, the other published by four UN agencies (UNICEF, UNFPA, World Bank and World Health Organization). Although both approaches are based on similar sets of empirical country data, their statistical methods differ in important r...

Killeen's probability of replication and predictive probabilities: how to compute, use, and interpret them.

P. R. Killeen's (2005a) probability of replication (prep) of an experimental result is the fiducial Bayesian predictive probability of finding a same-sign effect in a replication of an experiment. prep is now routinely reported in Psychological Science and has also begun to appear in other journals. However, there is little concrete, practical guidance for use of prep, and the procedure has not...

24-hour national dietary survey data: how do we interpret them most effectively?

OBJECTIVE To illustrate the effect of common mistakes when using 24-hour national dietary survey data to estimate the prevalence of inadequate nutrient intakes. DESIGN Raw data on nutrient intake from the Australian 1995 National Nutrition Survey were adjusted for within-person variance using standard techniques and corrected for underreporting using the criteria of Goldberg et al. The distri...

How to Interpret Epidemiological Associations

Cardiovascular disease is among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in industrialized countries. Hypertensive disease, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, diet, and physical inactivity have been identified as risk factors, but they do not entirely explain the worldwide variability of cardiovascular disease (1,2). It has long been suspected that cardiovascular disease mortality may...