OBJECTIVE A method that would allow in situ comparison of the degrees of adherence to genital epithelia by the biofilms of the normal flora. SUBJECTS Four healthy women. SETTING Departments of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, and of Medicine, University of British Columbia. METHODS In situ, scraped specimens were taken from the vagina and ectocervix before and after vigorous va...

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is the most common interstitial pneumonia and the most aggressive interstitial lung disease. Usually, IPF is confirmed by the histopathological pattern of typical interstitial pneumonia and requires an integrated multidisciplinary approach from pulmonologists, radiologists and pathologists. However, these diagnoses are performed at an advanced stage of IPF. A...

PURPOSE To evaluate the efficacy and safety of 0.18% sodium hyaluronate ophthalmic solution (Rejena, Vismed) compared with its vehicle for the treatment of signs and symptoms of dry eye disease. DESIGN Randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. METHODS A total of 444 subjects with dry eye disease were randomized 1:1 to active study drug (n = 221) or vehicle control (n = 223) in this mul...

In psychological research sometimes non-parametric procedures are in use in cases, where the corresponding parametric procedure is preferable. This is mainly due to the fact that we pay too much attention to the possible violation of the normality assumption which is needed to derive the exact distribution of the statistic used in the parametric approach. An example is the t-test and its non-pa...

McElduff F, Cortina-Borja M, Chan SK, Wade A. When t-tests or Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests won’t do. Adv Physiol Educ 34: 128–133, 2010; doi:10.1152/advan.00017.2010.—t-Tests are widely used by researchers to compare the average values of a numeric outcome between two groups. If there are doubts about the suitability of the data for the requirements of a t-test, most notably the distribution bei...

BACKGROUND Thyroid adenoma associated (THADA) has been identified as the target gene affected by chromosome 2p21 translocations in thyroid adenomas, but the role of THADA in the thyroid is still elusive. The aim of this study was to quantify THADA gene expression in normal tissues and in thyroid hyper- and neoplasias, using real-time PCR. METHODS For the analysis THADA and 18S rRNA gene expre...

The Wilcoxon signed rank test is a frequently used nonparametric test for paired data (e.g., consisting of pre- and posttreatment measurements) based on independent units of analysis. This test cannot be used for paired comparisons arising from clustered data (e.g., if paired comparisons are available for each of two eyes of an individual). To incorporate clustering, a generalization of the ran...

In many research disciplines, hypothesis tests are applied to evaluate whether findings are statistically significant or could be explained by chance. The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney (WMW) test is among the most popular hypothesis tests in medicine and life science to analyze if two groups of samples are equally distributed. This nonparametric statistical homogeneity test is commonly applied in molec...

Gene set analysis is widely used to facilitate biological interpretations in the analyses of differential expression from high throughput profiling data. Wilcoxon Rank-Sum (WRS) test is one of the commonly used methods in gene set enrichment analysis. It compares the ranks of genes in a gene set against those of genes outside the gene set. This method is easy to implement and it eliminates the ...

The generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) statistic (Fan, Zhang, and Zhang (2001)) offered a generally applicable method for testing nonparametric hypotheses about nonparametric functions, but its efficiency is adversely affected by outlying observations and heavy-tailed distributions. Here a robust testing procedure is developed under the framework of the GLR by incorporating a Wilcoxon-type arti...