Douglas Graham AltmanFMedSci (12 July 1948 – 3 June 2018) was an English statistician best known for his work on improving the reliability and reporting of medical research and for highly cited papers on statistical methodology.[1] He was professor of statistics in medicine at the University of Oxford, founder and Director of Centre for Statistics in Medicine and Cancer Research UK Medical Statistics Group,[2] and co-founder of the international Equator Network for health research reliability.
Professional career
Doug Altman graduated in 1970 with an honours degree in statistics from Bath University of Technology, now the University of Bath. His first job was in the Department of Community Medicine, St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London. 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. 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.
Altman was chief statistical advisor to the British Medical Journal, where he was a member of the editorial "hanging committee", and co-convenor of the statistical Methods Group of the Cochrane Collaboration.
Work on research integrity
In 1994, he published an editorial in the BMJ where he argued that the poor use of statistics in medical research was scandalous.[3] He wrote "What should we think about researchers who use the wrong techniques, use the right techniques wrongly, misinterpret their results, report their results selectively, cite the literature selectively, and draw unjustified conclusions? We should be appalled".[4] and concluded "We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons".[5]
Altman was regarded as a leading authority on the execution and reporting of health research,[6] and played a leading role in establishing better standards. He was one of the co-founders of the international EQUATOR health research reliability network, and a member of the CONSORT Group from 1999, a group dedicated to offering a standardised way for researchers to report trials.
He was also one of the original authors of the IDEAL framework for improving surgical research.[7]
Contributions to statistical education
Altman's publications on statistical education, many co-authored with his long-standing collaborator Martin Bland, are well known among the medical profession, being noted for their practical relevance and clarity.[8] His textbook Practical Statistics for Medical Research, published in 1991, has sold 50,000 copies in hardback.[9]
Notable achievements
Example of a Bland–Altman plot for comparing the agreement between two methods of measurement
Altman was the author of over 450 papers in statistical methodology, with 11 being cited over 1,000 times. Among them is a 1986 paper published in The Lancet titled Statistical methods for assessing agreement between two methods of clinical measurement[10] introduced the Bland–Altman plot. As of 2014[update] the paper was ranked 29th in the Nature/Web of Science Top 100 most-cited research papers of all time.[11] and as of 2018[update] it had been cited over 40,000 times.[4]
In 2015 Altman was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the BMJ, where he was credited by the editor, Dr Fiona Godlee, with having "done more than anyone else to encourage researchers to fully report what they actually did, warts and all, rather than letting the best be the enemy of the good or, worse, pretending that research is perfect".[13]
Altman was born on 12 July 1948 in London to Jack and Decima Altman.[14] He died from bowel cancer[15] on 3 June 2018.[16] He was survived by his wife Sue, and their children Louise and Edmund.[17]
Statistics With Confidence: Confidence Intervals and Statistical Guidelines (2000). Editors: Douglas G. Altman, David Machin, T. N. Bryant, Martin J. Gardner. ISBN0-7279-0222-9
Systematic Reviews (1999). Editors: Douglas G. Altman, Iain Chalmers. ISBN0-7279-0904-5
Statistics in Practice: Articles Published in the British Medical Journal. (1982). Editors: Sheila M. Gore, Douglas G. Altman. ISBN0-7279-0085-4
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.
^Deeks, Jonathan J; Hopewell, Sally; Moher, David; Higgins, Julian PT; Moons, Karel GM; Chandler, Jackie; Antes, Gerd (14 September 2018). "Doug Altman's legacy to Cochrane and evidence synthesis". Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. doi:10.1002/14651858.ED000127.
^"BMJ Group Lifetime Achievement Award". BMJ. 340 (jan14 2): c242 –c242. 14 January 2010. doi:10.1136/bmj.c242.
^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.
