Deep infection is a devastating complication in the orthopaedic surgery. It usually requires a revision surgery and a risk for further complications increases greatly. Functional outcome is usually much worse after deep infection compared to uneventful primary surgery especially if removal of implants is required to eridicate the infection. Deep infection are often systematically recorded […]
Category: Statistics
What sort of improvement we need in our research?
This is not a new study but I came across to this study by Brophy et al. titled “Update on the Methodological Quality of Research Published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine“. They concluded: Despite a dramatic increase in the number of published articles, the research published in AJSM shifted toward more prospective, randomized, […]
S-values in statistical inference
James Brophy writes about key issues in the statistical interpretation of RCTs in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology. What caught my eye was the mention about S-values: Enhanced understanding of the strength of the evidence against not only the null hypothesis but against any specific alternative hypotheses can be more easily appreciated by considering p […]
Rules of thumb or just rules in statistics?
I just had to blog this tweet because it encapsulates so many things which are lost in modern biomedical research:
Simplest things are usually hardest
I was doing some background research related to a comparison of continuous variables when sample size is sufficiently small. I came up with this paper by de Winter titled Using the Student’s t-test with extremely small sample sizes. I viewed the relevant results and when I got to the very final sentence of the paper […]
Do we have bigger problems than possible lowering the threshold of statistical significance
Evans et al. published following study in the Arthroscopy Journal “The Potential Effect of Lowering the Threshold of Statistical Significance From P < .05 to P < .005 in Orthopaedic Sports Medicine”. This caught my attention since these authors published similar article in another journal in 2019 titled “Effects of a proposal to alter the statistical significance threshold on […]
Larger sample sizes in orthopaedics?
My recent research efforts have concerned metaresearch on orthopaedic RCTs. We have argued many aspects in those studies and in their quality. One major aspect is the sample size which still remains very small. In our recent paper we investigated orthopaedic RCTs published in 2016 and 2017 and we reported: The median numbers of patients […]
When you thought you had seen it all…
I follow regularly the field of sports surgery and new studies published in that subspecialty. It seems the true research gems are only seen in sports surgery… I introduce the recent top 2 studies in this and subsequent post. I have research interest in ACL reconstruction studies and this study published in the American Journal […]
Why do we need randomized trials?
Discussion about randomized controlled trials (RCT) has been extensive in social media during this spring due to corona virus epidemic. This discussion was especially heated when “not so good” clinical trial was published stating that hydroxychloroquine is efficient in the treatment of corona virus disease (CoViD-19). I drew this picture and posted it on Twitter. […]
Exploratory or confirming study?
Methodology is hard. And making valid inferences is very hard. With regard to these topics, orthopaedic research is not very different to other field in medicine. It means that misconceptions, misunderstandings and flawed approaches are prevalent also in our field. American Journal of Sports Medicine published recently two papers which both made a quite common, […]