Reply to: 'Statistical power in "Prophylactic surfactant nebulisation for the early aeration of the preterm lung: a randomised clinical trial"

We thank Dr Hagan for his letter highlighting the importance of a critical interpretation of statistical analyses. 1 2 Designing trials to investigate novel therapeutic approaches in the neonatal population is difficult, mainly due to lack of high-quality data for adequate sample size calculation. For this reason, we performed electrical impedance tomography pilot measurements in five healthy very preterm infants immediately after birth to generate baseline data. As correctly noted by Dr Hagan, the assumption of normality was violated for the primary outcome in our final data set, and thus, a non-parametric test was used for analysis. In addition, the IQR was larger than expected based on our pilot data. We already discuss this in our manuscript: ‘The median difference was as large as hypothesised but the confidence intervals were wider than expected which may be due to the highly adaptive situation in the DR...
Source: Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition - Category: Perinatology & Neonatology Authors: Tags: PostScript Source Type: research