IA Math SL IA topic on "statistics"

[nothingmuch]

hi so ive got to write an IA for Math SL and i decided to do it on the side effects of the type-2 diabetes drug "actos," which is known to increase the risk of developing heart failure.

so far my idea is something along the lines of finding out how many adults in the US could get heart disease as a result of taking actos, assuming that all adult type-2 diabetes patients take actos.

my outline:

- how many adults there are in the US (its online)

- how many of them have type-2 diabetes (its online) & what percent of all the adults in the US do they make

- the probability of an adult with diabetes developing heart failure (its online) & the percentage of these actos patients that could potentially develop heart failure (so i'll turn the fraction into a percentage)

- since actos increases the chance of heart failure by 4%, ill add 4 percent to the percentage

- this final percentage is percent of the adults in the US that could develop heart failure by taking actos, and i'll turn this into a number too to show the amount of people

i tried to be original with my idea, but in the end all im really doing is basically adding, multiplying, and turning things into percentages and back. no complex IB SL level math like derivatives or anything. is this too simple or id this how all statistics IAs go? and does this even count as statistics? and if it doesn't, any ideas on other areas of math i could look into? i liked the idea of game theory but i didn't really understand how math fit into it so i stuck with this.

any help would be appreciated and if u don't get any part of my question ill try to explain =)

[Emmi]

That's not really "statisics," more of just basic math and is much too simple. Statistics and probability is actually a good topic for an IA, it's just that what you've done doesn't really count as that. Try going through a copy of the SL curriculum and look at what kinds of statistics you learn (you learn things like normal distributions, standard deviations, etc) and see if you can tweak your topic a bit in order to include some of those topics.