title: Note in statistical treatment of medical and pharmaceutical data.
abstract: This study highlights the essential concept in the statistical treatment of medical and pharmaceutical data. To explain the concept, artificial data generated using random numbers was analyzed, and the importance of the confidence interval and distribution of data was shown. Sole use of the standard deviation (SD) is not considered appropriate from the viewpoint of clinical treatment, because many oversights occur. It was shown by considering the confidence interval that such oversights rarely occur, and the safety level is increased. Moreover, the probability of the occurrence of outliers from the average can be calculated by the distribution of data. Thus, pharmacokinetic data for humans were examined. The results for the human data also support the importance of the confidence interval and the distribution of differences between groups.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Osaka University, 1-6 Yamada-oka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. kawase@phs.osaka-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Masaya
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kawase
authors.forename: Hiroki
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Konishi
authors.forename: Kiyohito
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Yagi
authors.forename: Rika
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Nishikiori
authors.forename: Tatsuya
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Takagi
mesh_terms: D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D016008:Statistical Distributions