The biostatistics It is a scientific discipline that is responsible for application of statistical analysis to different issues linked to the biology . It can be said that biostatistics is an area or a specialization of statistics , the science dedicated to the quantitative study of all types of variables.
At the beginning of XIX century The practice of appealing to mathematical methods for the quantification of patient variables began to expand. Tuberculosis, for example, is a disease which began to be studied in depth from mathematical data.
The medicine In this way, he incorporated biostatistics to his studies to obtain data on infections, epidemics, etc. The analysis of statistics recorded by doctors and nurses, little by little, became very important for the generation of useful information in treatments and prevention campaigns.
Biostatistics can be useful in various fields of public health . Analyzing the weight that adolescents between 15 and 18 years old register, to cite a possibility, an obesity epidemic can be diagnosed or warned of a high rate of malnutrition. In the sector of the epidemiology , biostatistics help detect how an epidemic progresses or recedes, where prevention is proving most effective or where more resources need to be sent to reverse a negative trend.
The ecology You can also use biostatistics to record levels of pollution and other indicators that directly affect the lives of people, animals, plants and other living things.
The first scientist to use mathematical methods to analyze data of his patients and their respective diseases was Pierre Charles-Alexandre Louis , a French doctor born in the year 1787. As mentioned in a previous paragraph, the first application of biostatistics focused on a study that Louis conducted on tuberculosis in his work entitled Numerical method, which was of great influence to the doctors who followed him.
His students and disciples, for their part, took advantage of their discoveries to improve and expand the methods used so far and bring his legacy to the inevitable evolution. His teachings continued to inspire several generations of scientists, to the point that a century later they could be seen in the maps and epidemiological analyzes carried out by the Frenchman Louis René Villermé and the Englishman William Farr.
In 1812, on the other hand, a French mathematician and astronomer named Pierre Simon Laplace published a treatise on the analytical theory of probabilities that supported the importance of biostatistics in solving medical problems.
One of the most relevant concepts in this context is the modern evolutionary synthesis , also called neo-Darwinian synthesis or new synthesis, among other names. It's about the fusion of the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin and the genetics of the Catholic Augustinian monk Gregor Johann Mendel , author of Mendel's laws, which are the basis of the heritage genetics.
For the modern synthesis of the evolution , two elements of great importance were the modeling and reasoning of biostatistics, which resulted in its foundation. After Mendel's work was rediscovered, a marked confrontation took place between his followers and the so-called biometric around the resolution of problems related to the understanding of the relationship between Darwinism and genetics.
Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall G. Wright, three renowned statisticians, were responsible for ending this conflict during the 1930s. At that time, they presented biostatistics as one of the fundamental branches of the new synthesis .
