Statistics review 11: Assessing risk

doi:10.1186/cc2908

Critical Care
Volume 8
Issue 4

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This article is part of a series on Medical statistics, edited by Jonathan Ball, Viv Bewick and Liz Cheek.

Review

Statistics review 11: Assessing risk

Viv Bewick¹ , Liz Cheek¹ and Jonathan Ball²

¹Senior Lecturer, School of Computing, Mathematical and Information Sciences, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

²Senior Registrar in ICU, Liverpool Hospital, Sydney, Australia

author email corresponding author email

Critical Care 2004, 8:287-291doi:10.1186/cc2908


Published:	30 June 2004

Abstract

Relative risk and odds ratio have been introduced in earlier reviews (see Statistics reviews 3, 6 and 8). This review describes the calculation and interpretation of their confidence intervals. The different circumstances in which the use of either the relative risk or odds ratio is appropriate and their relative merits are discussed. A method of measuring the impact of exposure to a risk factor is introduced. Measures of the success of a treatment using data from clinical trials are also considered.