DOUG Altman, who has died aged 69, dedicated his working life to improving the use of statistics in medical research.

Douglas Altman was born on July 12, 1948 in London into a middle class Jewish family.

At the age of nine he won a place at The Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Elstree.

But he struggled at school and was rejected by every university he applied to, because of his exam grades.

He had stayed on for an extra year, though, to improve his grades and took on a new 'pure maths and statistics' course offered by the school.

After a phone call from the newly established University of Bath he took up a place there to read statistics.

On completing his degree in 1970, he worked as a statistician at St Thomas' Hospital Medical School.

During this decade he became concerned by the use and abuse of statistics in medical research and began giving seminars on the topic when he moved to the MRC Clinical Research Centre in Northwick Park in 1980.

In a 1982 paper he summarised that the general standards of statistics in medical journals was 'poor' and a subsequent set of guidelines he published sold more than 50,000 copies and remains in print today.

His 1994 paper 'the scandal of poor medical research' was judged by the British Medical Journal in 2015 to be the most important paper published in the previous 20 years.

He moved to Oxford a year after publishing the paper - after a stint at what is now Cancer Research UK - and founded the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Headington.

He dedicated the rest of his life to the issue of poor research and established the Cochrane Collaboration an organisation which reviews research.

In 2006 he founded the Equator network to improve health research and was later recognised with the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society and the BMJ's Lifetime Achievement Award.

He died on June 3 and is survived by his wife Sue and their children Louise and Edmund.