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?

PETER L. HAVENS, MD, MS; JEFFREY S. GARLAND, MD
Department of Pediatrics Children's Hospital of Wisconsin PO Box 1997 1700 W Wisconsin Ave Milwaukee, WI 53201

Am J Dis Child. 1988;142(12):1262.

	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.—We are concerned about both the safety and utility of direct inspection of the epiglottis in patients with suspected laryngotracheobronchitis, as reported by Mauro and colleagues.

They report no complications on direct inspection of the epiglottis in six children with acute epiglottitis. The exact upper 95% confidence limit for this proportion (0/6) is 35%.¹ This means that the study results are compatible with a complication rate as high as 35% for direct inspection of the epiglottis in patients with acute epiglottitis. Safety of the procedure certainly remains in doubt.

There is a rapid method to calculate the approximate upper 95% confidence limit when the number of occurrences in a study is 0.^2,3 If N is the number of study subjects, 3/N approximates the upper 95% confidence limit. When N is greater than 30, this approximation is accurate to one decimal place. For Mauro and colleagues' study, the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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