Data may not have been summarised appropriately

BMJ 1996;313:361 (10 August)

Letters

Data may not have been summarised appropriately

EDITOR,--June M C McArdle and colleagues end their paper bysaying that "the failure to reduce morbidity in the combinedapproach [routine care plus support from a breast care nurseand a voluntary organisation] is difficult to explain."¹ Thislogic is not supported by the data presented.

An overconcentration on P values at the expense of descriptivetrends seems to have led the authors to conclude that "scoreswere consistently lower in patients offered support from [a]breast care nurse alone compared with the other groups, whichwere similar to each other." My interpretation of their datais that the poor showing of the combined approach is explainedsimply by two opposing effects, one larger than the other. Take,for example, their results for anxiety at 12 months. The meanswere 4.8 (routine care), 4.4 (routine care plus nurse only),6.3 (routine care plus voluntary organisation only), and 5.8(routine . . . [Full text of this article]

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Relevant Article

Psychological support for patients undergoing breast cancer surgery: a randomised study: June M C McArdle, W David George, Colin S McArdle, David C Smith, Alastair R Moodie, A V Mark Hughson, and Gordon D Murray
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