Uso de la estadística en la Revista Cubana de Higiene y Epidemiología, 1996-2009

statistics is an elemental tool in biomedical research; however it has been demonstrated that not always its use is in correspondence with scientific advances and achievement reached in the health field. a descriptive study was conducted with the objetive to describe the use of statistic techniques and the software, packages or programs of statistic calculation in the original papers of the cuban journal of hygiene and epidemiology. the published papers in the section of original papers from 1996 to 2009 were analyzed, excluding methodological researches, qualitative studies, bibliographic reviews and news, for a total of 180 original papers. the methods and results were carefully studied. the more frequent statistic techniques were: descriptive statistics (88.76 %), chi2 (17.3 %), risk measures (18.7 %), t student test (7.3 %) and logistic regression analysis (7.3 %). the great difficulty of the original papers published in the above mentioned journal was the lack of significant information for reproducibility of the research, due to the no precise of the applied sampling design and the statistic program. the statistic procedures were not used in an important number of papers.