A Practical Introduction to Biostatistics in the Spine Literature

The use of biostatistics is ubiquitous in the spine literature, however, many clinicians have not been trained in basic statistical principles and do not understand their application. The goal of statistics is to estimate the underlying distribution of a variable in the population based on the observations from a sample. Statistics allow investigators to determine the likelihood that specific groups of patients are different. Such comparisons are obviously important when attempting to determine the utility of a given treatment. The goal of this review is to cover the basic principles of biostatistics with a focus on spine-related examples.

Keywords: hypothesis testing, type I error, type II error, power