- Joined
- Sep 10, 2006
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Hello all!
I have a question for those of you with a statistical background. I'm looking at a medical study and need to know how much I can trust the results to help me make a medical decision. (I'm not looking at this study only, but the research in this area is scarce, so I don't have much to go on.) The study involves a small number of patients, so I'm worried about how well it generalizes to the rest of the population with those same characteristics.
Details:
Someone on another discussion board I am on stated this about the study:
With study sizes this small, the margin of error is very large. For this study, it's nearly 13% with a 95% confidence interval (i.e., we're 95% confident that that risk of recurrence is 16% +/- 13%).
Is her analysis correct? Something seems wrong with it - but I have not studied statistics in YEARS. I KNOW there are people on here who will be able to help!
Let me know if you need any other details to make sense of this.
I have a question for those of you with a statistical background. I'm looking at a medical study and need to know how much I can trust the results to help me make a medical decision. (I'm not looking at this study only, but the research in this area is scarce, so I don't have much to go on.) The study involves a small number of patients, so I'm worried about how well it generalizes to the rest of the population with those same characteristics.
Details:
5 of 31 patients with specific characteristics (16%) had a cancer recurrence
The researchers applied a Poisson regression analysis and found this was statistically significant (p = 0.0356) (significance was evaluated using a two-sided p < 0.05).
Someone on another discussion board I am on stated this about the study:
With study sizes this small, the margin of error is very large. For this study, it's nearly 13% with a 95% confidence interval (i.e., we're 95% confident that that risk of recurrence is 16% +/- 13%).
Is her analysis correct? Something seems wrong with it - but I have not studied statistics in YEARS. I KNOW there are people on here who will be able to help!
Let me know if you need any other details to make sense of this.