•  
  •  
 
The University of Louisville Journal of Respiratory Infections

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

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

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.