title: The 'Fishing License' method for analysing the time course of effects in repeated measurements.
abstract: Inference on the time of onset and the duration of a treatment effect is a challenging problem in biomedical research. These studies often generate repeated measurements from subjects in a treated group and a control group during the same time period. We propose a simple approach, called the 'Fishing License' method, to test for a treatment effect occurring during an unspecified time interval. The method is based on a statistic of the largest absolute value of the t statistic between two groups obtained by considering every possible time interval in the observed time period. A bootstrapped null distribution of the test statistic is used to determine the critical value. The method also provides estimates of onset and ending times, when the null hypothesis of no effect is rejected. Simulated and real experimental data sets were generated for assessing the performance of the method.
authors.affiliation: Department of Environmental Medicine, NYU School of Medicine, Tuxedo, NY 10987, USA.
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Nadziejko
authors.forename: Lung
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chi Chen
authors.forename: Arthur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nádas
authors.forename: Jing-Shiang
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Hwang
mesh_terms: D000393:Air Pollutants / Q000009:adverse effects; D000818:Animals; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D004562:Electrocardiography / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D006973:Hypertension / Q000503:physiopathology; D008297:Male; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012016:Reference Values; D015656:Respiratory Mechanics; D013223:Statistics as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D013696:Temperature; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D000393:Air Pollutants