Most Common Statistical Methodologies in Recent Clinical Studies of Community-Acquired Pneumonia

Authors

Stephen Furmanek, Division of Infectious Diseases / University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USAFollow
Connor L. English, University of LouisvilleFollow
Thomas Chandler, University of LouisvilleFollow
Timothy L. Wiemken PhD, University of LouisvilleFollow

Funder

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Abstract

Background: Training new individuals in pneumonia research is imperative to produce a new generation of clinical investigators with the expertise necessary to fill gaps in knowledge. Clinical investigators are often intimidated by their unfamiliarity with statistics. The objective of this study is to define the most common statistical methodologies in recent clinical studies of CAP to inform teaching approaches in the field.

Methods: Articles met inclusion criteria if they were clinical research with an emphasis on incidence, epidemiology, or patient outcomes, searchable via PubMed or Google Scholar, published within the timeframe of January 1st 2012 to August 1st 2017, and contained Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) keywords of “pneumonia” and one of the following: “epidemiologic studies”, “health services research”, or “comparative effectiveness research” or search keywords of community-acquired pneumonia” and one of the following: “cohort study”, “observational study”, “prospective study”, “retrospective study”, “clinical trial”, “controlled trial”, or “clinical study”. Descriptive statistics for the most common statistical methods were reported.

Results: Thirty articles were included in the analysis. Descriptive statistics most commonly contained within articles were frequency (n=30 [100%]) and percent (n=30 [100%]), along with medians (n=22 [73%]) and interquartile ranges (n=19 [63%]). Most commonly performed analytical statistics were the Chi-squared test (n=20 [67%]), logistic regression (n=18 [60%]), Fisher’s exact test (n=17 [57%]), Wilcoxon rank sum test (n=16 [53%]), T-test (n=13 [43%]), and Cox proportional hazards regression (n=10 [33%]).

Conclusions: We identified the most common clinical research tests performed in studies of hospitalized patients with CAP. Junior investigators should become very familiar with these tests early in their research careers.

DOI

10.18297/jri/vol1/iss4/9

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Furmanek, Stephen; English, Connor L.; Chandler, Thomas; and Wiemken, Timothy L. PhD (2017) "Most Common Statistical Methodologies in Recent Clinical Studies of Community-Acquired Pneumonia," The University of Louisville Journal of Respiratory Infections: Vol. 1 : Iss. 4 , Article 9.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18297/jri/vol1/iss4/9
Available at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/jri/vol1/iss4/9