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Published on: February 16, 2011
Beyond the mean: Rethinking how we should describe clinical outcomes
Łukasz Lewandowski1, Robert Prill2,3, Michael T Hirschmann4,5
1Department of Medical Biochemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Immunochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, Wroclaw Medical University, Wroclaw, Poland.
Summary
Orthopaedic and rehabilitation research should move beyond simple averages. Analyzing outcome distributions, not just means, better reflects patient recovery complexity and heterogeneity for personalized medicine.
Area of Science:
- Orthopaedic and Rehabilitation Research
- Biostatistics
- Clinical Trial Methodology
Background:
- Clinical research in orthopaedics and rehabilitation frequently uses mean-based statistics to summarize treatment outcomes.
- However, many common outcomes (e.g., pain, mobility, patient-reported outcomes) are complex, exhibiting skewness, zero-inflation, or ordinal properties, and significant patient heterogeneity.
- Mean-based summaries can obscure crucial data features like varied responses, ceiling/floor effects, and clinically relevant variability, especially in the context of personalized medicine.
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