In reference to Advanced Pediatric Mastoiditis With and Without Intracranial Complications

✍ Scribed by Chi-Te Wang;; Shiou-Yi Chen,

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 41 KB
• Volume: 120
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0023-852X
• DOI: 10.1002/lary.20760

✦ Synopsis

We read with great interest the article titled ''Advanced Pediatric Mastoiditis With and Without Intracranial Complications'' by Zevallos et al. 1 In this article the authors conducted a retrospective cohort review of advanced pediatric mastoiditis, compared the demographic factors and specific bacteriological differences between cases with and without intracranial complications, and concluded that anaerobic infection was more common in pediatric mastoiditis patients with intracranial complications.

However, we find that the statistical method used in these comparisons was not accurate. Only the factor ''age'' in Table is normally distributed, the other factors, including gender, history of otitis media, and presence of specific bacteria infection in Tables and are binomially distributed. The authors used the Student t test to compare the difference of ''proportions'' between two groups. The only way that the Student t test could be adequately applied in this circumstance was the fulfillment of normal approximation of binomial distribution, 2 that is, n 1 pq ! 5 and n 2 pq ! 5; where n ¼ case number of condition, p ¼ proportion of certain fac-