Pre-referral rectal artesunate in severe malaria: flawed trial.

Background: Immediate injectable treatment is essential for severe malaria. Otherwise, the afflicted risk lifelong impairment or death. In rural areas of Africa and Asia, appropriate care is often miles away.

Calculating unreported confidence intervals for paired data.

Background: Confidence intervals (or associated standard errors) facilitate assessment of the practical importance of the findings of a health study, and their incorporation into a meta-analysis. For paired design studies, these items are often not reported. Since the descriptive statistics for such studies are usually presented in the same way as for unpaired designs, direct computation of the standard error is not possible without additional information.

Outcome based subgroup analysis: a neglected concern.

Background: A subgroup of clinical trial subjects identified by baseline characteristics is a proper subgroup while a subgroup determined by post randomization events or measures is an improper subgroup. Both types of subgroups are often analyzed in clinical trial papers. Yet, the extensive scrutiny of subgroup analyses has almost exclusively attended to the former.

No short-cut in assessing trial quality: a case study.

Background: Assessing the quality of included trials is a central part of a systematic review. Many check-list type of instruments for doing this exist. Using a trial of antibiotic treatment for acute otitis media, Burke et al.

Simple polynomial multiplication algorithms for exact conditional tests of linearity in a logistic model.

The linear logistic model is often employed in the analysis of binary response data. The well-known asymptotic chi-square and likelihood ratio tests are usually used to detect the assumption of linearity in such a model. For small, sparse, or skewed data, the asymptotic theory is however dubious and exact conditional chi-square and likelihood ratio tests may provide reliable alternatives.