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?

Hema Patel, MD, FRCPC; Colin Macarthur, MB ChB, PhD; David Johnson, MD
The Hospital for Sick Children 555 University Ave Toronto, Ontario Canada M5G 1X8

Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1996;150(12):1314.

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

Dr Nishioka expresses concern about the interpretation of results from our study of corticosteroid use in immunocompetent children with and without complicated varicella.¹ We highlighted the 95% confidence interval (0.2-16.9) around the point estimate (odds ratio, 1.6) as a more appropriate and significantly lower clinical estimate of risk than that previously published.²

Only 2 case subjects and 1 control subject with recent corticosteroid drug exposure were found in a review of 1079 medical charts; clearly, corticosteroid drug use in the group of immunocompetent children with varicella is a rare event. Furthermore, complicated varicella in itself is uncommon. Given this rarity, degree of risk is very much a relative issue. Using the method of Schlesselman³ for power estimation with unequal case-control ratio, the power to detect a relative risk of 12 or greater was 80%³; the power to detect a relative risk of 2 was 6%. These . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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