Clinical epidemiology

Examining the principles and methods of research on the evaluation of factors affecting the outcome of illness, this volume emphasizes diagnostic and therapeutic interventions - the factors most readily modified by health care providers. The author discusses various ways of structuring observations on patient groups and appraises the nature and strength of inferences drawn from those observations. Weiss also demonstrates how the results of this type of research - clinical epidemiologic research - can be incorporated into the decision-making process utilized in clinical medicine." Among other changes, this new edition of Clinical Epidemiology greatly expands the chapter on randomized controlled trials and includes a whole new chapter on meta-analysis, authored by Peter Cummings with Noel S. Weiss. Meta-analysis, the statistical synthesis of data from comparable studies, was unheard of thirty years ago, but with the advent of increased computer technology, the method has been steadily growing in importance in the interpretation of the results of patient-oriented medical research. Clinical Epidemiology is an essential reference guide to the quantitative assessment of the consequences of illness for clinicians in training or in practice.