Acta anaesthesiologica Scandinavica
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Acta Anaesthesiol Scand · Feb 2021
ReviewInterpreting the results of clinical trials, embracing uncertainty: A Bayesian approach.
Most clinical trials use null hypothesis significance testing with frequentist statistical inference to report P values and confidence intervals for effect estimates. This method leads to a dichotomisation of results as 'significant' or 'non-significant'. ⋯ The use of Bayesian statistics is introduced in this paper for a hypothetical sepsis trial with worked examples in the R language for Statistical Computing environment and the open-source statistical software JASP. It is hoped that this general introduction to Bayesian inference stimulates some interest and confidence among clinicians to consider applying these methods to the interpretation of new evidence for interventions relevant to anaesthesia and intensive care medicine.