An epidemiologist for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a large Health Management Orga
ID: 3178470 • Letter: A
Question
An epidemiologist for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, a large Health Management Organization, was interested in determining the relationship between heavy cigarette usage and high blood pressure. She decided to have physicians administer a questionnaire assessing smoking to every patient who came into the clinic over the course of the next year - 2016. Additionally, blood pressure measurements were taken following a standardized protocol. She determined that 7000 patients had hypertension and 18,000 patients did not have hypertension. She determined that half of the subjects with hypertension also smoked, and one-third of the normotensive subjects also smoked. What type of study should we conduct with this information?
Explanation / Answer
This particular situation could be prefectly modeled using the Bayesian statistics modelling, where we have the concepts of true positives, true negatives, false positives and false negatives.
In this particular study:
True positives are the patients who smoke and have hypertension
True negatives are the patients who don't smoke and don't have hypertension
False positives are the patients who don't smoke but have hypertension
True positives are the patients who smoke but don't have hypertension