Statistical errors in medical research - a review of common pitfalls

Biomarkers: Promising and valuable tools towards diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of Covid-19 and other diseases

“…These methods involve the evaluation of the variables that show a different behavior between two groups of samples for example control vs. pathological or control vs. drug treated. The classical statistical methods suffer from some weaknesses, such as a lack of statistical power, lack of interpretable results, and omitting of complex relationships between variables [ 180 ]. Although classical statistical methods based on univariate and bivariate tests are easy to use and interpretation of the results, are not sufficient to extract and analyze all of the ’omic’ data sets and should only be used as an exploratory or complementary secondary method [ 181 ].…”

Statistical analysis and reporting: common errors found during peer review and how to avoid them

“…Authors should make sure that they provide a clear statement of the study design and ensure that their reporting follows the recommended reporting guidelines for that design, as provided by the EQUATOR network (http://www.equatornetwork.org/). Other papers and text books providing guidance on statistical analysis and reporting are available [3][4][5][6][7] including previous guides published in Swiss Medical Weekly [8][9][10].…”

Response to “Response to ‘Characteristics of nursing homes associated with COVID‐19 outbreaks and mortality among residents in Victoria, Australia’”

“…The foundations of interpreting empirical research are frequently noted as differentiating what is statistically significant, what is real and what is clinically important, 3 (p119) and of appreciating the assumptions of statistical tests and the implications when these are violated. 4 The Pearson χ 2 test and associated p values assume that the finite data are sampled from an (effectively infinite) population. 5 (p308) This is to be distinguished from our research study, which did not sample but rather included the entire population of nursing homes in Victoria.…”