Higher order response adaptive urn designs for clinical trials with highly successful treatments.

We consider a problem of reducing the expected number of treatment failures in trials where the probability of response to treatment is close to 1 and treatments are compared based on log odds ratio. We propose a new class of urn designs for randomization of patients in a clinical trial. The new urn designs target a number of allocation proportions including the allocation proportion that yields the same power as equal allocation but significantly less expected treatment failures.

Antimüllerian hormone as a predictor of natural fecundability in women aged 30-42 years.

Objective: To generate estimates of the association between markers of ovarian aging and natural fertility in a community sample at risk for ovarian aging.

Methods: Women aged 30-44 years with no history of infertility who had been trying to conceive for less than 3 months provided early-follicular phase serum and urine (N=100). Subsequently, these women kept a diary to record menstrual bleeding and intercourse and conducted standardized pregnancy testing for up to 6 months.

Detection of rapidly growing mycobacteria in routine cultures of samples from patients with cystic fibrosis.

Rapidly growing mycobacteria (RGM) are respiratory pathogens in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF), but detection generally requires specialized cultures for acid-fast bacilli (AFB; AFB cultures). We determined that RGM could be recovered from routine cultures of samples from patients with CF by extending incubation of the Burkholderia cepacia selective agar (BCSA) from 5 to 14 days. To explore the impact of this modification, we compared results from routine and AFB cultures of samples from CF patients for 2 years before (4,212 samples by routine culture, 1,810 samples by AFB culture, 670 patients) and 2 years after (4,720 samples by routine culture, 2,179 samples by AFB culture, 695 patients) the change.