Yiwu and Zebra,
Re the Appalling Fulgham study.
Leaving aside the factually incorrect second sentence of the Results, "27% of pts achieved rigidity sufficient for intercourse despite being challenged to the highest dose." should have been written "73% of pts failed to achieve rigidity sufficient for intercourse despite being challenged to the highest dose." otherwise it is nonsense, the abstract is even more dreadful and misleading than I first thought.
It took me ages to work out what they did.
Step 1: They took 115 men and tested with 250ug muse. They had 13 successes and 84 failures (11% success on 250ug muse)
Step 2: They tested the 84 failures with 500ug muse. They had 14 successes and 70 failures (23% success with up to and including 500ug muse)
Step 3: They then tested only 10 of these 70 failures with 1000ug muse. They had 4 successes and 6 failures (10/115 is 9% as in the Vivus press release)
An adjusted overall success rate for up to and including 1000ug muse can be obtained,
((13 + 14 + (4/10 x 70))/115 x 100 = 48%
This estimate will have huge confidence intervals because of the error inherent in the small sample size of 10 at the highest dose. (The Vivus statistician can work this out)
The authors could have presented a better abstract. The nicest thing I can say, and without risking accusations of libel, is that they are totally incompetent at writing an abstract.
I would really relish being Leland Wilson on Monday morning when questioned about this study.
"Well Leland, how do explain this evidence, so different from your own that muse is only effective in 27% of men?"
Leland,
"Uhh no, in fact they made a mistake, there is a typo in the abstract, it should be 48%."
"And anyway even this only depends on their looking at 10 men, we looked at thousands."
Joking apart, it appears to me that what Vivus need to do is to try to drag the analysts and Pfizer into defending this study. Vivus should then be able to massacre them.
DaiS
PS The abstract is tricky, please tell me if my figures are wrong.
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