Methods of Clinical Epidemiology

This book provides an introduction to the common research methodology specific to clinical epidemiology for both students and researchers. The goal of the book is to fill the gap left by texts that concentrate on public health epidemiology and focuses on what is not covered well in such publications. The four sections of the book cover methods that have not previously been brought together in one volume and serve as a second level textbook of clinical epidemiology methods. Some of the most important topics included in this volume are: clinical agreement in quantitative measurements, interpretation of diagnostic tests, sample size considerations, modelling time-to-event data and meta-analysis. The book will be useful for clinical researchers as well as for postgraduate students in clinical epidemiology. In this second edition, sections related to modeling of binary outcomes and research synthesis methods have been extensively updated.

Suhail Doi is associate professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Queensland. He is involved in teaching, student supervision, curriculum development and research. He has published widely and his interest lies in research that addresses unanswered questions in patient care as well as questions related to methods of research design and analysis used in medicine. Thus his research focuses on patient care topics such as epidemiology, prognosis and treatments of disease as well as methodology especially that related to meta-analysis. He is the co-author of the Doi-Thalib method for meta-analysis which was introduced in 2008 as an alternative to the random effects model.

Gail Williams is professor of international health statistics at the University of Queensland. She has had long involvement in curriculum development and teaching in graduate programs in biostatistics and epidemiology, as well as consulting in clinical medicine and public health. Her specific areas of expertise include design and analysis of longitudinal studies, clinical and field intervention trials, survey design, and mathematical modelling. The focus of her applied research has been maternal and child health, a range of infectious diseases, and skin cancer. Her methodological areas of interest lie in statistical and mathematical modelling and approaches to dealing with attrition in longitudinal studies.