Statistical Methods for Pooling ages of End-Stage-Renal-Disease patients The Examples of India and Malaysia

Abstract

In pharmacoeconomic literature, age has been shown to be an important variate concerning cost analyses of End-Stage-Renal-Disease (ESRD) patients. In the present article, pooling of data relative to ages of ESRD patients is proposed as a method for estimating typical age parameters like means and variances, and also for comparing age differences between countries. Statistical techniques for mean and variance estimation, large sample statistical theory, confidence intervals for means, and parametric tests for statistical inference concerning comparison between means are used, and the main advantages of pooling are investigated. Homogeneity of the pooled data is also discussed using mixture models. As an example of application, data obtained from four countries were included into our analysis. Results showed that pooling of data increases the power of the tests used for statistical inference, apart from providing a better accuracy for the estimates of the means. Thus, statistical results are noticeably improved when pooling of data is used.