Customer Reviews

Bayesian Approaches to Clinical Trials and Health-Care Evaluation (Statistics in Practice)

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Clinical research in the US is heavily regulated by the FDA to insure that safe and effective products including drugs vaccines and medical devices come to market and that the clinical trials expose products that either are unsafe, ineffective or both. In recent years with the advent of Bayesian hierarchical models that have posterior distributions of the model parameters determined by Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, the FDA has accepted the use of Bayesian approaches in medical devices and there seems to be some progress in the area of pharmaceuticals as well.

This book is a welcome addition to the literature on applied Bayesian methods. The authors provide a clear description of the methods and how they can be applied to clinical trials and health economic studies. It is very timely to have such a great reference since industrial statisticians are in need of learning and applying the techniques.

This is an excellent introduction to Bayesian methods for anyone conducting health technology assessment, meta-analysis, and health economic analysis. Even if you're not a Bayesian, it adds depth and perspective to universal concepts such as statistical power, generalizability, and hypothesis testing. The chapters on cost-effectiveness and evidence-synthesis will be invaluable to anyone conducting pharmacoeconomics models or health technology assessments of pharmaceuticals or medical devices.