Doug Altman

Professor Douglas G. Altman (born 1948) is a British statistician. He is the Founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group.

His varied research interests include the use and abuse of statistics in medical research, studies of prognosis, regression modelling, estimation methods, systematic reviews and meta-analysis, randomised trials, reporting guidelines and studies of medical measurement.

Early professional years

Doug Altman graduated in statistics from the University of Bath. His first job was in the Department of Community Medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School. He then spent 11 years working for the Medical Research Council's Clinical Research Centre where he worked almost entirely as a statistical consultant in a wide variety of medical areas.

Current professional activities

In 1988 Doug Altman became head of the newly formed Medical Statistics Laboratory (now Medical Statistics Group) at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), and in 1995 also became founding director of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (CSM) in Oxford. In 1998 he was made Professor of Statistics in Medicine by the University of Oxford.

He is the statistical advisor to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), where he is a member of the editorial "hanging committee". He is a co-convenor of the statistical Methods Group of the Cochrane Collaboration.

He is an active member of the CONSORT Group since 1999, a group dedicated to offering a standardised way for researchers to report trials. The intent is to make the experimental process more clear, flawed or not, so that users of the data can more appropriately evaluate its validity for their purposes.

Doug Altman is also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and editor in chief of Trials.

He is also one of the original authors of the IDEAL framework for improving surgical research.^[2]

Notable achievements

• The Bradford Hill Medal by the Royal Statistical Society for his contributions to medical statistics in 1997.

• DSc from the University of London in 1997.

Select bibliography

Books authored

• Altman, Douglas G. (1991). Practical Statistics for Medical Research. Monographs on Statistics and Applied Probability (first ed.). Chapman & Hall. ISBN 978-1-58488-039-4. 

• Practical Statistics for Medical Research (1990). Douglas G. Altman ISBN 0-412-27630-5

Books edited

• Systematic Reviews in Healthcare: Meta-Analysis in Context (2001). Editors: Douglas G. Altman, Iain Chalmers, Gerd Antes, Michael Bradburn, Mike Clarke, Matthias Egger, George Davey-Smith. ISBN 0-7279-1488-X

• Statistics With Confidence: Confidence Intervals and Statistical Guidelines (2000). Editors: Douglas G. Altman, David Machin, T. N. Bryant, Martin J. Gardner. ISBN 0-7279-0222-9

• Systematic Reviews (1999). Editors: Douglas G. Altman, Iain Chalmers. ISBN 0-7279-0904-5

• Statistics in Practice: Articles Published in the British Medical Journal. (1982). Editors: Sheila M. Gore, Douglas G. Altman. ISBN 0-7279-0085-4

Peer-reviewed articles

List of the over 396 articles by Doug Altman available through PubMed.

• David M, Kenneth FS and Altman DG for the CONSORT Group. (2001) Revised recommendations for improving the quality of reports of parallel group randomized trials. Lancet 14, 1191-4.

• Bland JM, Altman DG. (1986) Statistical methods for assessing agreement between 2 methods of clinical measurement. Lancet i, 307-310. A reprint is available HERE
• BMJ Statistical Notes - A series of short articles on the use of statistics by Doug Altman and his longtime collaborator Martin Bland.

• Altman DG, Bland JM. (1983) Measurement in medicine - the analysis of method comparison studies. The Statistician 32, 307-317.

• Bland JM, Altman DG. (1999) Measuring agreement in method comparison studies. Statistical Methods in Medical Research 8, 135-160.

• Bland JM, Altman DG. (1995) Comparing methods of measurement - why plotting difference against standard method is misleading. Lancet 346, 1085-1087.

References

1. ↑ "Bradford Hill Medal". Royal Statistical Society. Retrieved 3 January 2010.  Established in memory of Sir Austin Bradford Hill FRS
2. ↑ McCulloch P, Altman DG et al. "No surgical innovation without evaluation: the IDEAL recommendations." Lancet. 2009 Sep 26;374(9695):1105-12. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61116-8.

External links

• Doug Altman's profile at ISI Highly Cited Researcher website
• Doug Altman's profile at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine
• CONSORT Statement webpage