With great interest we read the study by Tawfik et al. [
[1]
] entitled, “Interleukin 17 and 10 in a sample of Egyptian relapsing remitting multiple
sclerosis patients”. In this study, the authors investigated serum levels of IL-10
and IL-17 in patients with relapsing remitting (RR) MS during relapse and remission
phases and controls. Although it was mostly a well-designed study, we have the following
comment from a statistical point of view. In the statistical analysis, the authors
stated that they used Mann-Whitney test for not normally distributed quantitative
variables. In this study, comparison of IL-10 and IL-7 in two phases of MS and in
healthy controls was performed using Mann-Whitney test. Mann-Whitney test is used
to determine whether there are any statistically significant differences between the
means of two independent (unrelated) groups. But the groups of this study were not
independent, because they did not use two different groups of MS patients as relapsing
and remitting groups. Indeed, they used 30 RRMS patients as both relapsing and remitting
groups in two different times based on the phases of disease. Therefore, two groups
of this study are dependent and using the Mann-Whitney test is not appropriate. After
assessment of the normal distribution of quantitative variables, they must use dependent
t-test or Wilcoxon for comparison of the mean levels of IL-10 and IL-7 between relapsing
and remitting phases of the disease.To read this article in full you will need to make a payment
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Reference
- Interleukins 17 and 10 in a sample of Egyptian relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis patients.J. Neurol. Sci. 2016; 369: 36-38
Article info
Publication history
Published online: April 26, 2017
Accepted:
April 25,
2017
Received:
April 1,
2017
Identification
Copyright
© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.