Meta-Research: Why we need to report more than 'Data were Analyzed by t-tests or ANOVA'
- Mayo Clinic, United States
Abstract
Transparent reporting is essential for the critical evaluation of studies. However, the reporting of statistical methods for studies in the biomedical sciences is often limited. This systematic review examines the quality of reporting for two statistical tests, t-tests and ANOVA, for papers published in a selection of physiology journals in June 2017. Of the 328 original research articles examined, 277 (84.5%) included an ANOVA or t-test or both. However, papers in our sample were routinely missing essential information about both types of tests: for example, 213 papers (95% of the papers that used ANOVA) did not contain the information needed to determine what type of ANOVA was performed, and 26.7% of papers did not specify what post-hoc test was performed. Most papers also omitted the information needed to verify ANOVA results. Essential information about t-tests was also missing in many papers. We conclude by discussing measures that could be taken to improve the quality of reporting.
Data availability
All data from the systematic review has been uploaded with the manuscript, along with the abstraction protocol.
Article and author information
Author details
Tracey L Weissgerber
Oscar Alejandro Garcia Valencia
Funding
American Heart Association (16GRNT30950002)
- Tracey L Weissgerber
National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1 TR000135)
- Tracey L Weissgerber
Mayo Clinic (Robert W. Fulk Career Development Award)
- Tracey L Weissgerber
National Cancer Institute (R03-CA212127)
- Stacey J Winham
Walter and Evelyn Simmers Career Development Award for Ovarian Cancer Research
- Stacey J Winham
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Weissgerber et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Meta-Research: Why we need to report more than 'Data were Analyzed by t-tests or ANOVA'
eLife 7:e36163.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.36163
Further reading
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It has been well documented that cold is an enhancer of lipid metabolism in peripheral tissues, yet its effect on central nervous system lipid dynamics is underexplored. It is well recognized that cold acclimations enhance adipocyte functions, including white adipose tissue lipid lipolysis and beiging, and brown adipose tissue thermogenesis in mammals. However, it remains unclear whether and how lipid metabolism in the brain is also under the control of ambient temperature. Here, we show that cold exposure predominantly increases the expressions of the lipid lipolysis genes and proteins within the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVH) in male mice. Mechanistically, by using innovatively combined brain-region selective pharmacology and in vivo time-lapse photometry monitoring of lipid metabolism, we find that cold activates cells within the PVH and pharmacological inactivation of cells blunts cold-induced effects on lipid peroxidation, accumulation of lipid droplets, and lipid lipolysis in the PVH. Together, these findings suggest that PVH lipid metabolism is cold sensitive and integral to cold-induced broader regulatory responses.
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- Medicine
Background:
Post-endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) pancreatitis (PEP) is a severe and deadly adverse event following ERCP. The ideal method for predicting PEP risk before ERCP has yet to be identified. We aimed to establish a simple PEP risk score model (SuPER model: Support for PEP Reduction) that can be applied before ERCP.
Methods:
This multicenter study enrolled 2074 patients who underwent ERCP. Among them, 1037 patients each were randomly assigned to the development and validation cohorts. In the development cohort, the risk score model for predicting PEP was established via logistic regression analysis. In the validation cohort, the performance of the model was assessed.
Results:
In the development cohort, five PEP risk factors that could be identified before ERCP were extracted and assigned weights according to their respective regression coefficients: –2 points for pancreatic calcification, 1 point for female sex, and 2 points for intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm, a native papilla of Vater, or the pancreatic duct procedures (treated as ‘planned pancreatic duct procedures’ for calculating the score before ERCP). The PEP occurrence rate was 0% among low-risk patients (≤0 points), 5.5% among moderate-risk patients (1–3 points), and 20.2% among high-risk patients (4–7 points). In the validation cohort, the C statistic of the risk score model was 0.71 (95% CI 0.64–0.78), which was considered acceptable. The PEP risk classification (low, moderate, and high) was a significant predictive factor for PEP that was independent of intraprocedural PEP risk factors (precut sphincterotomy and inadvertent pancreatic duct cannulation) (OR 4.2, 95% CI 2.8–6.3; p<0.01).
Conclusions:
The PEP risk score allows an estimation of the risk of PEP prior to ERCP, regardless of whether the patient has undergone pancreatic duct procedures. This simple risk model, consisting of only five items, may aid in predicting and explaining the risk of PEP before ERCP and in preventing PEP by allowing selection of the appropriate expert endoscopist and useful PEP prophylaxes.
Funding:
No external funding was received for this work.
