[Significance of medical statistics in insurance medicine]

Knowledge of medical statistics is of great benefit to every insurance medical officer as they facilitate communication with actuaries, allow officers to make their own calculations and are the basis for correctly interpreting medical journals. Only about 20% of original work in medicine today is published without statistics or only with descriptive statistics--and this trend is falling. The reader of medical publications should be in a position to make a critical analysis of the methodology and content, since one cannot always rely on the conclusions drawn by the authors: statistical errors appear very frequently in medical publications. Due to the specific methodological features involved, the assessment of meta-analyses demands special attention. The number of published meta-analyses has risen 40-fold over the last ten years. Important examples for the practical use of statistical methods in insurance medicine include estimating extramortality from published survival analyses and evaluating diagnostic test results. The purpose of this article is to highlight statistical problems and issues of relevance to insurance medicine and to establish the bases for understanding them.