Letter

Multiple test procedures other than Bonferroni's deserve wider use

BMJ 1999; 318 doi: 10.1136/bmj.318.7183.600a (Published 27 February 1999)
Cite this as: BMJ 1999;318:600.2

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  1. Ralf Bender, Research fellow.,
  2. Stefan Lange, Reserach fellow. (bender@uni-duesseldorf.de)
  1. Department of Metabolic Diseases and Nutrition (WHO Collaborating Centre for Diabetes), Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf, D-40001 Düsseldorf, Germany
  2. Department of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, Ruhr-University of Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany

    EDITOR—Recently, Perneger tried to establish that adjustments for multiple testing are unnecessary.1 However, the main arguments against multiplicity adjustments are based on misunderstanding of and a lack of knowledge about simultaneous statistical inference.

    Firstly, Perneger equated multiple test adjustments with Bonferroni corrections. The Bonferroni procedure ignores dependencies among the data and is therefore much too conservative if the number of tests is large.2 Hence, we agree with Perneger that the Bonferroni method should not be routinely used. This is, however, no argument against the use of multiplicity …

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