Fatigue and psychological distress

doi:10.1136/bmj.320.7233.515/a

BMJ 2000;320:515 ( 19 February )

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Fatigue and psychological distress

Statistics are improbable

Authors' reply

Statistics are improbable

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Although this paper by Pawlikowska et al is nearly six years old, I read it only two months ago.¹ I am surprisedthat there seem to be no letters or articles referring to it topoint out that the analysis isflawed.

The authors report results from a general health questionnaire on a scale of 0 to 36. They provide a histogram for the distribution,which has a mean close to 14. The authors quote the mean scoresfor men and women as 24.7 and 26.2 respectively. They give confidenceintervals for these means and for the difference between them.These means are both above the 90th centile of the distributionof general health questionnaire score that they show. They areclearlyimpossible.

Their fatigue score is also shown as a histogram. Possible values for observations are between 0 and 33, and the mean is alsoabout 14. The means for men and women are quoted . . . [Full text of this article]

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