Prof. Subbaiah Perla publishes meta-analysis of esophageal cancer incidence

The opening of the Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine has motivated a number of joint research projects between Beaumont physicians and OU faculty. For example, Prof. Subbaiah Perla, of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, recently published a joint paper with a team of doctors lead by Tusar Desai of the Department of Internal Medicine at Beaumont Hospital. Their report is titled “The Incidence of Oesophageal Adenocarcinoma in Non-Dysplastic Barrett’s Oesophagus: A Meta-Analysis,” and was published in the July issue of the British medical journal Gut (Volume 61, Pages 970-976). The goal of the paper is to analyze the results of many clinical studies using meta-analysis, a type of statistical method that is useful for combining results of different studies to draw more valid conclusions. In their case, the goal was to examine the incidence of esophageal cancer in patients with a disorder known as Barrett’s esophagus.