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Essay on Biostatistics for Public Health

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My health profession is focus on biostatistics. Biostatistics is a branch science of statistics, which is a core discipline in public health. It focuses on developing and applying the statistical techniques and methods to analyzed data to extract necessary information. Its interesting area does not limits to biological science, the research work covers medicine, pharmacy, public health and agriculture.[Wikipedia] As an integral part of public health, biostatistics is responsible for understanding a health event to design experiments, collecting data for the experiments, understanding the collected data and making inferences and interpretations base on the analyzed results. The interpretations could used to forecast a health event, identify …show more content…

• Relative Risk In the first unit, we talked about the concept of relative risk. Relative risk is the ratio of the probability of a health event in the exposed group to the probability of the event in the non-exposed group. It is be used to figure out how a factor relates to the health problem. Generally, if the ratio of relative risk is greater than 1, then we could say the likelihood for the exposed group suffering the health problem is higher than the non-exposed group and suggest the suspected risk factor is related to the health problem. While, the bigger the ratio, the more relevant between the risk factor and the health problem. [Lecturettee] How relative risk relates to biostatistics The relative risk is designed to determine how a risk factor relates to a health event. Considering the in-class example which want to find whether smoking is related to coronary heart disease (CHD), the experiment was set as recruiting 2 groups of people, one is consist of smokers and the other is consist of non-smokers. Researchers made surveillance on them for a period of time and then find out how many of them have CHD after the experiment period. The relative risk is the ratio of the rate of CHD for smokers to the rate of CHD for non-smokers. From this example, it could be found that calculating the relative risk relates to the functions of data collection, applying statistical techniques to the health problem and make conclusion

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