Ok just to clarify Zenox's good point here, the researchers generally set the significance levels before the research begins. In our case it was determined to be 10%. So they say the 'Alpha' (
α) level is 0.1.
What the heck does that mean? Yeah Mozz speak...This means that there is 10% risk of deciding that an effect (of iPPS) exists when in actuality, it does not and we got it wrong. So this is relatively low. The lower this significance level is eg 5% or 1% as an example, the more testing we need to attain stronger sample evidence to support this supposition. The benefit of this is that we can tolerate a
higher P level.
Remember P levels are the probability that your sample will have an effect at least as strong as the entire population if the null hypothesis is correct.
Jeepers...ok more Mozz interpretation.
Null hypothesis is just the fact that there is no effect. ie our drug does nothing, there is no change for instance. So we want the P value to be as low as possible. In other words we WANT a darned change! We want the patient to get better, we want the effect size to be great, in other words we want the P value, the probability of there being no effect, to be miniscule/tiny....closer to zero/nada...so we usually look for P values under 0.05 right?
In this Heart Failure pre clinical model we can tolerate a P value being anything under 0.1 (instead of the harder to get 0.05 and lower) as acceptable statistically, normally we would want it to be <0.05 which is less than 0.1. So 0.1 looks initially bad...but it is actually not bad.
That's my interpretation.
If the above means nothing to you, a high level summary is the data from the pre clinical heart failure indication was good enough for us to proceed to the next step...
Sorry it was a stats lesson but thanks to Zenox again for pointing this out.
I needed to work out what the heck it meant for myself!
Back to a glass of red wine, anyone?
(I know @Violin1 will ask me what red wine is it,,,tonight it is Barwang Cab Sav - Hilltops (NSW) region 2016. Nice drop with a good curry, compliments that spice).
(20min delay)