New statistical analysis methodology in health problems research
Keywords:
methodology, statistics, implicative statistical analysis, medical research, causality, interpretation of resultsAbstract
Introduction: Traditional statistical techniques used to study causality are based on the assumption of linearity, even though the complexity of health-disease processes is known.
Objective: To describe the foundations, design and validation of a methodology for the application of implicative statistical analysis in medical causality research and to evaluate its effectiveness in solving a specific health problem.
Methods: The design of the proposed methodology was based on the articulation of procedures developed from previously identified limitations. Validation was carried out through 3 studies. The first one for criterion corroboration through comparison with binary logistic regression. The second one for content validation allowed verifying the correspondence of the rules obtained with what was proposed in the literature. In addition, most of these rules were classified, according to the experts criteria, as correct, and a favorable opinion was issued on the methodology by its potential users. The third study was a meta-analysis that summarized the indicators obtained in the studies that applied the methodology, which also corroborated its good performance.
Results: By evaluating the effectiveness of the methodology, it was possible to identify the prognostic factors of mortality due to breast cancer in the province of Santiago de Cuba.
Conclusions: The methodology constitutes a new perspective of data analysis and interpretation of results, which contributes to improving causality research in medicine, therefore, its use in these studies is recommended.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The journal Anales de la Academia de Ciencias de Cuba protects copyright, and operates with a Creative Commons License 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 4.0). By publishing in it, authors allow themselves to copy, reproduce, distribute, publicly communicate their work and generate derivative works, as long as the original author is cited and acknowledged. They do not allow, however, the use of the original work for commercial or lucrative purposes.
The authors authorize the publication of their writings, retaining the authorship rights, and assigning and transferring to the magazine all the rights protected by the intellectual property laws that govern in Cuba, which imply editing to disseminate the work.
Authors may establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (for example, placing it in an institutional repository or publishing it in a book), with recognition of having been first published in this journal.
To learn more, see https://creativecommons.org
