Lynn Shaffer's Research Essentials
The essentials for interpreting research and statistics
I have a self-published novel available on Amazon at this link: GRIP. I finally have a post about writing! Here’s a description: Small packages don’t always hold good things… Claire Smithfield assumed she would follow the path set for her as a wife, mother and public health epidemiologist. Instead, fate rewarded her with trips to…
What It Is Applies to randomized trials. Every effort is made to include data from all randomized patients in the statistical analysis, according to the group to which they were originally randomized. Why It’s Important Randomization assigns patients to groups based on chance, increasing the likelihood that the people across study groups are equivalent with…
What It Is In randomized trials, this is preventing people involved in conducting the trial from knowing the sequence of treatment assignments produced by randomization. In other words, when a participant is enrolled it is not known what treatment they will be assigned to. Why It’s Important When investigators and others know the randomization schedule…
Scroll down to the bottom of this post for the essentials. Soon after the da Fonseca trial (Part 1) appeared in the literature, the New England Journal of Medicine published a large randomized clinical trial examining weekly intramuscular injections of 17 alpha-hydroxyprogesterone caproate (17-OHPC) to prevent recurrent preterm delivery. The results of this trial led…
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Spoiler alert: not as much as we should at this point. I was going to write a more straightforward post but I was at an ob/gyn journal club a couple of days ago where we discussed a fairly recent article (Oct 2019) reporting on a randomized controlled trial meant to confirm the positive results of…
This site is intended for clinicians and others who are planning a research study or who must evaluate a peer-reviewed scientific article to determine whether it will affect their practice. The focus is to inform on the research methodology and statistical concepts that are relevant to these objectives as efficiently as possible. In other words,…