Preface
The key task is how to connect some statistical concepts to the daily practices or consequences in medicine.
Mean and standard deviation
Before we moving on, let’s think about the following hypothetical situations.
Imagine that you are now a prestigious doctor sitting at a high-end hospital. Here are four hypothetical patients, you asked your assistant to measure and report the patients' blood pressure every 2-minute for one hour via 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. One hour later, you got the following results:
- Patient A: mean= 129.95 mmHg, standard deviation=36.18
- Patient B: mean= 134.97 mmHg, standard deviation= 18.09
- Patient C: mean= 137.46 mmHg, standard deviation= 27.14
- Patient D: mean= 142.49 mmHg, standard deviation= 9.05
Your assistant is waiting for your decisions:
- Which one of the patients you will treat first and why?
- Which one of the patients you will treat last and why?