This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

ROBERT LEE BRAWLEY, MD
Department of Epidemiology School of Public Health The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC 27514

Am J Dis Child. 1985;139(10):962.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Sir.—Siegel et al¹ reported a randomized clinical trial of the treatment of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonitis in pediatric cancer patients.

The study design described in their article, however, does not allow the reader to evaluate critically the methods used in this clinical trial. It would be helpful to know the type I and type II errors and the clinically meaningful difference² used to determine their sample size. What were the criteria developed for ending the trial? What was the power calculated with the reported trial size?

The lack of details about the prior planning of randomized clinical trials in the literature has been previously reported, with particular emphasis on the hazards of insufficient trial size.² A nonsignificant result in a small trial has been stated to yield almost no information.³

Perhaps AJDC should consider adding a statistician to the Editorial Board for a more comprehensive review . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?