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Article: Hearty relief: cardiology.(testing drug treatments for heart attacks)(Science and Technology)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- March 25, 1995
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"IF YOUR experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand's greatest contribution to science, had a physicist's love of the unmistakable. Unfortunately, advances in medical treatments are rarely quantum leaps; new drugs are often only slightly better than existing ones. But for some serious diseases, "merely moderate" improvements of a few percentage points can save thousands of lives. Detecting these small improvements requires a lot of statistical power, which can be acquired only by comparing a lot of results. Hence "mega-trials": random studies of thousands of patients from hundreds of hospitals across several ...