I am a Masters in Statistics graduate but I wasn’t always one! I began my journey to studying statistics by reading clinical trials, mostly related to health and nutrition. I was drawn to do this by wanting to find the source of all the health headlines I’d been reading in the news. This led me to the original scientific research articles.

I saw that they all used statistics to analyze their data and I wanted to understand it!

And eventually, I wanted to be able to do it myself.

---

This blog is about learning to understand and interpret the statistical analyses that are commonly used in analyzing the data from scientific studies regarding health, nutrition and medicine. It will not go heavily into the mathematics or statistical terminology, but just enough so that you can understand the analyses used in the studies. You will also learn a lot about statistics in general, because the concepts are applicable to a wide variety of subjects.

Visualization of the data and/or analysis can help immensely with understanding and a large part of reading studies is being able to understand the charts and tables. To me, the most interesting part of the analysis can be figuring out how to represent the data visually in the most truthful and informative way.

I’ll include the code to produce the analyses and visualizations  in R, the statistical computing software. This is another way to help understand the analysis. I will assume basic knowledge of the software.

Lastly, this site is also for my own learning and support of concepts I’ve studied but perhaps not solidified in my mind.

I hope that I can help you become an informed reader of scientific studies. That way you can make informed decisions as to whether or not you want to change any behaviors after reading a study.

Hopefully we can both learn something!

John Edward Slough II